...why is there still an irredentist rump, still carrying on as if it’s 1972, reducing a complex dispute over power and equality and national allegiance to something as naively simplistic as Brits Out?

It could be the men who murdered Kieran Doherty look around and see that the supposedly new Northern Ireland looks suspiciously like the old one. It could be they see a society still so bitterly divided, still so deeply segregated, that they believe they can exploit historical animosities, that they can capitalize on an almost reflexive tendency among most people in Northern Ireland to view things along narrow sectarian lines, as “us versus them,” an “us” that remains largely defined by a combination of religion and national identity.

And they may have a point. While the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland have shown a willingness to not kill each other, they have been less enthusiastic about the prospect of actually living with each other. Northern Ireland remains very segregated, physically and psychologically. Most people live in neighborhoods that remain overwhelmingly populated by one of the two main traditions: Catholic nationalists, who aspire to unity with the Irish Republic, and Protestant unionists, who want to remain part of the United Kingdom.

And it comes at great cost, not least in the duplication of services:

Not only is there an official ethos of separate but equal, but an infrastructure underpinning it. There are three times as many so-called peace lines — elaborate walls separating working-class neighborhoods — than there were at the height of the Troubles, 88 of them at last count.

I walked through Protestant housing projects in North Belfast and noticed many vacant apartments. On the other side of the peace line, the Catholic projects were overcrowded. But there is no attempt to move Catholic families into the vacant apartments because, as they say in Belfast, even the dogs in the street know there’d be riots.

With segregation the status quo, there is an enormous duplication of public services, such as schools, community centers, and health clinics. The Alliance Party, the only major political party that draws substantial numbers from both sides of the divide, estimates that duplication of public services costs more than $1 billion a year, this in a place the size of Connecticut with a population of less than 2 million.

You can read the whole thing here

A similar device under the passenger seat of a car belonging to a police officer’s girlfriend in East Belfast was further evidence of growing expertise in the hands of dissidents. Does this mean dissident engineering skills are improving or has there been an influx of fresh personnel with real bomb-making skills? Neither of these two factors is mutually exclusive.

It has also been revealed that the Newry bombers had undertaken a dry run to the courthouse nearly a year ago in a huge disruptive exercise which paralysed traffic.

There is no evidence that security experts are seeing particularly new or original technology. What is shaking the police to the core is the fact that these -IEDS ( improvised explosive devices) are now detonating.

What is not clear is why rebel republicans are now having success after such a long period of botched operations like the device discovered not far from Ballykinlar security base in South Down. Again the bomb at the policing board headquarters in Belfast only partially exploded.

A former IRA activist who is totally committed to the peace and political processes is highly critical of some of the individuals known to him who are linked to dissident republicanism.

He pointed out it is not always easy to know the young people now involved because the IRA ended the war in 1994 when some of these people were only children.

And he repeated his rejection of the pursuit of “post-conflict justice”

Dr Ramos Horta was equally scathing about the issue of post-conflict justice in the Timor-Leste context. “When it comes to , everybody wants to do some experiment on democracy or justice. I simply say no,” he said. “The midget intellectuals who regurgitate academic jargon about justice can go on and on dispensing academic judgments on poor little us, but my people, whom I know well, they applaud the wisdom of my policies – that is: heal the wounds, reconcile, and move on . . . I am not going to play Don Quixote de la Mancha of justice to pursue every seen or unseen culprit of the past.”

As the Irish Times report also points out

Timor-Leste was designated a priority country by Irish Aid, the Government’s overseas development division, in 2003.

From 2003 to 2009, Irish Aid provided more than €30 million towards poverty reduction programmes and projects aimed at strengthening governance, human rights and public service capacity. The Department of Foreign Affairs also engages with Timor-Leste through its conflict resolution unit.

One hopes, for the sake of the people of Timor-Leste…

Reports have suggested that the price extracted for their support for Hillsborough is a post-dated letter of resignation from the First Minister, to be cashed-in if the DUP decides at a later date that Sinn Fein has reneged on whatever has been arranged. If we are being asked to back the DUP-Sinn Fein deal, we are surely entitled to know in what circumstances that resignation letter would be put into effect. We also need to know who would make that decision.

Again, according to reports, the decision would be taken by the DUP executive, which would mean that the First Minister could be dumped even if the DUP Assembly party wanted him to remain in office for the sake of their jobs. In any walk of life prudent people like to know who they are doing business with and it is a legitimate point of public and cross-party interest to ask where the power of decision now lies in the DUP.

In clarifying this, the DUP can also end the confusion about what they think happens, or what they intend should happen, after the devolution vote next month.

Also from the BBC report

A car was abandoned close to the gates of the courthouse at about 2200 GMT on Monday. Police were evacuating the area when the bomb went off.

...republicans are in a rather worse position than the SDLP. The settlement in Northern Ireland is essentially Hume-ite. It accepts the province’s place in the union as the consequence of majority sentiment freely expressed, but it doesn’t let that majority actually do anything democratically in any devolved intuitions. Hence mandatory power-sharing, or more precisely, election-discounting devolution is the order of the day. This is not what Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness presided over 30 years of terrorism to achieve. It is what Hume told them 30 years ago they’d end up settling for. And it leaves the republican leadership with a near-unanswerable problem in terms of managing its base.

But what makes the republican leadership so odd is precisely what binds them together in the first place: atavistic nationalism. You can forgive “your side” virtually anything if you hate the other side enough. But that’s the problem Adams and McGuinness face and can’t escape from. They’ve sold their unionist-phobic supporters “the process” not on the Hume-ite basis that it represents a “shared present” on the best terms possible, pending the day at some point in the demographic future when all this sort of thing can be dispensed with. Rather, they’ve consistently oversold it as being part of an inevitablist triumph.

Thus, on matters like policing and justice, Sinn Féin has repeatedly lied to its own supporters that a date for transfer from Westminster to Stormont was both negotiated and agreed. It’s beyond non-republicans like me why anyone falls for this inside the laager, but there you are. From this willed self-delusion, Sinn Féin has proceeded to try to hold the entire process to ransom by saying that unless what it failed to do constitutionally and democratically – negotiate a transfer date, for example – happens retrospectively, it will attempt to destroy the entire settlement by withdrawing from it.

Most of those individuals who attended my mother’s wake had heard the same stories and scandals that I had and more besides — because I moved away from republican Belfast physically and psychologically and politically a long time ago, and they stayed right in the heart of it. They knew better than I did the myriad ways in which the authority figures they respected and held up as icons of political virtue had turned a blind eye to appalling abuses — yet they remained true to the republican faith.

Including the woman who has now spoken so painfully of what happened to her, who has been keen to stress her continuing loyalty to the republican movement. Knowing all they did, they still bought into the myth of the republican family, even when they could see that the republican family tree was rotten to the core, and when it was clear that certain people in that family tree had a special branch all of their own, where they were protected from the consequences of their worst actions.

They could internalise the things they knew, and then kind of not know them any more, in order not to let anything damage the struggle.

She sees clear roots in the Russian anarchists of an earlier age:

Sergey Nechayev, the 19th century Russian nihilist, who wrote his Catechism of the Revolutionary as a blueprint for the destruction of society, described such a man best: “All the tender and effeminate emotions of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude, and even honour, must be stilled in him by a cold and single-blooded passion.”

As it happens, we know that the bond of kinship does survive, because Adams, as the evidence now seems incontrovertible, treated his brother Liam differently from any other person in west Belfast who had been accused of the abuse of his own child; and he was also prepared to continue to publicly eulogise their father, despite now admitting that the man was a sadistic brute and sexual predator who abused some of his own children.

Even so, Nechayev’s words still ring chillingly true. The only ultimate love is for the revolution; the necessities of struggle transcend all other considerations. Adams could eulogise monsters because the eulogies served a cause which needed to sentimentalise where it came from in order to justify what it was doing. In that way, he was no different from the community he represented. He was the same, only more so

And finally:

Terrorists, like sexual abusers, like doing unspeakable things to human flesh. It’s just that politics gives one side of the same perverted coin a convenient excuse. It’s certainly no coincidence that so many women get turned on by violent men, or that other violent men rally round to hush up their crimes.

Islamic suicide bombers take this diseased sexuality to its ultimate conclusion by turning their very bodies into weapons.

In retrospect, it’s a pity that the IRA’s heroes didn’t have the courage of their convictions to adopt the same methods themselves, because then there would have been fewer of them around to rape women and children, and fewer to cover up for their abusive comrades afterwards.

But then the IRA always were cowards. They didn’t mind who died for the cause, just so long as it wasn’t them. What’s emerging now is only scratching the surface of their vicious collective history.

As the Catholic Church found out before them, once the floodgates open, there’s no closing them again.

And as a subsequent report in Irish Times added

A federal minister in Islamabad echoed Pakistan’s fears that a fresh influx of 30,000 US troops might drive more Taliban fighters into Pakistan. “We know they are not a popular force,” he said. “The Afghans will probably never give them a majority in parliament.

But with Pakistan’s help and only with Pakistan’s help, the return of the Taliban to the political high table will be a far more stabilising development for Afghanistan than . . . [a US] surge.” Renewed discussion of the possibility of a negotiated settlement presents an opportunity for Pakistan’s intelligence services, which were instrumental in the creation of the Afghan Taliban in the mid-1990s, to reassert their potential for US foreign policy objectives in the region.

But, as with the creative ambiguity used here, there is the risk of unintended consequences.

As I said in a previous related post

“Whether they can identify, and enlist, suitably inclined capos warlords to be politicians remains to be seen.”

And from an earlier related post [*cuckoo* cuckoo* - Ed]

Interestingly, [Brendan] Simms places the “liberal interventionism” of Mitchell Reiss here amidst a US strategy of “the export of democracy” - a theme which was explored by Adam Curtis in part three of his documentary series The Trap. [added links]

If you can find it Curtis’ programme is worth watching, in particular, as one of his criticisms of that US strategy in the past was that it, more often than not, resulted in incomplete, or partial, versions of the democracy intended.

As the scandal threatened Adams’s career last week, many in Ireland wanted to see him as a victim as well. To cite a typical instance, when Eamon Keane asked a furious Sinn Fein spokeswoman a few polite questions on his show on Newstalk radio, the listeners exploded. They praised Adams’s “courage” and denounced the mean “agenda” of his critics. “Shut your gob,” cried one. “Gerry Adams is a good man. This is a family matter and should be dealt with inside the family.”

Keeping child abuse private has all but destroyed Irish Catholicism, which also uses the language of victimhood and persecution complexes to deflect legitimate questions.

In the Sindo, Eoghan Harris observes that this cultural omerta has not served the Irish people well in the past:

Daniel Corkery, the influential ideologue of Irish nationalist identity, believed that Irish identity was composed of a trinity of passions: land, religion and nationality. My belief is the exact opposite. I believe that Irish identity is based on a distortion of these three passions.

Land, and the lust for land, has morphed into our passion for property speculation. Religion has regressed to a repulsive repressive sexuality in the Roman Catholic Church. Nationality has come to mean a nasty nationalism which had no time for northern Protestants.

Secrecy is the shared sin of Corkery’s unholy trinity. (Significantly, Hamlet suggests an oath of secrecy to his men.) Land wars were conducted by secret societies—as secretive as the cabals who shared the spoils of property speculation. Religion, in the form of Irish Catholicism, ruled with a culture of secrecy. Nationalism, in the form of the IRA, demands secrecy on pain of death.

And Harris says of Adams the man:

The Adams voyage is around the sins of all our fathers. And it will take truth to light us home. Like Albert Speer, Adams is in denial about some of the darker deeds done on his watch. But unlike Speer—who went to his grave lying to himself—Gerry Adams can still act with good authority.

As a start he should stop talking about how his father’s abuse “besmirched” the tricolour. Because in making peace Adams implicitly rejected his father’s fanatic politics. This suggests that Adams found his father out, not just on the personal level, but on the political level too. Time he took the final step and admitted that the armed struggle “besmirched” the tricolour as much as abuse.

For his sake, and ours, Gerry Adams needs to go to journey’s end. He should call Tommie Gorman back and tell his true story. The story of a Hamlet who listened for 30 years to the gruesome ghosts of Irish nationalism, but finally found the guts to tell them to go away.

....we are still being “careful to test out the scaffolding”. There are many difficult conversations to be had about our complex and contested history and how we address its impact on the people of this island and that of our neighbours to the east, yet we must, above all, develop the courage where “we may let the scaffolds fall, confident that we have built our wall”.

More from the report

Ruling on the new challenge, Lord Justice Coghlin set out the contents of a letter from the Security Minister giving reasons for revoking his licence.

“In reaching that decision Paul Goggins had regard to information made available to him that you are a leading and active member of the Real Irish Republican Army who held the position of officer commanding of RIRA prisoners within HMP Maghaberry prior to your release from prison in November 2008,” it stated.

“During your sentence, you remained in regular contact with senior RIRA members and involved in directing RIRA business, and displayed a clear desire to continue your involvement in RIRA activity on your release, including in becoming involved in plans for attacks that would present a threat to public safety.

“From immediately on your release you have been in regular contact with leading RIRA figures. It is assessed that you have taken up a leading role in the organisation and have been involved in plans to conduct attacks.”

McCafferty categorically denied the allegations in the letter, which was not read out in open court during a summary of the nine-page judgement.

Which would seem to call into question the decision to release McCafferty under licence in the first place.

I confess that I never thought the Sinn Fein-IRA family and the DUP family would ever accommodate one another, not least because I thought the former would never disarm, and the latter were too bigoted. I was wrong, of course; but many people have been wrong in the sorry history with which we are burdened.

Apportioning blame is easily done, but is seldom a useful exercise. But what interests me most of all is the social mechanism which enables the unthinkable of one decade to become not merely thinkable but achievable two decades later.

He argues that the Irish elected political dog - north and south - has an almost phobic fear of ‘the unelected tail’:

...fear of the tail has been an obsessive pathology of Irish political life, even though that tail usually comprises the violent, the unhinged, the hate-filled and the plain ignorant. Worse still, so powerful is the tail within the Irish psyche that almost all political parties have tried to appease it by anticipating its demands.

Ian Paisley was the classic tail, around which the entire dog revolved until, finally, he became the dog itself.

If you wag the dog in order to keep the tail happy, the tail simply gets uppity. I have never used the Adams-McGuinness leadership as an example of how things can be done, and perhaps for obvious reasons. But as the Irish Republic slides to economic and social perdition, what they achieved within the Sinn Fein-IRA family stands out even more starkly as a perfect model of vision and courage.

FOR decades a key publicity plank of Irish nationalism has been to act the “Mope” (Most oppressed people ever). It has been a successful tactic as the story has been swallowed internationally by a broad swathe of the politically correct liberal left. The Mope myth is reason that smug agitprop comedians feel entitled to make the kind of offensive remarks about Ulster unionists, that had they been made about any other ethnic grouping would have caused uproar.

It is why documentary makers visiting Northern Ireland seem capable of only seeing one side of the story, thus rendering their output little better than propaganda. Believing that all unionists are subhuman violent bigots, the human rights industry frets about the welfare of republican terrorists while turning a blind eye to the thousands that they killed or maimed and dippy Californian girls weep into their organic skinny lattes at the fate of the little Irish babies that the British Army continue to this day to throw under tank tracks. And so it goes on.

At the same time, Henry Kelly (who was Northern editor of the Irish TImes in the early 70s) picks up on Dawn Purvis’s criticism of mainstream unionism’s blind eye to the causes of the troubles and in particular to the parlous quality of living for it’s own Protestant working class:

“They (mainstream unionists) deny discrimination existed. They deny that all working-class people but mostly Catholics endured in slums, squalor, poverty and unemployment in order to preserve the power of the political elite . . . You continue to deny working-class children, Protestants, the right to a decent education by holding on and wanting to hold on to academic selection . . . I have to say to you, you are living in denial and have to start looking at what caused the conflict here…”

It’s a text book example of what Senator Eoghan Harris calls good authority (ie telling the truth to your own side). But Kelly goes on to ask a question too rarely raised within nationalism (in public at least):

...was the situation in Northern Ireland before 1968 so oppressive for the Catholic minority that they had no choice but to follow the road embarked upon by the civil rights movement later hijacked by the IRA? And was the Protestant working class all that much better-off, with their mothers polishing their doorsteps in case the Queen Mother would pass down their street while their children were going to school in “mutton dummies” – Belfast home-made paper shoes?

And finally:

Unless, however, we ask ourselves some serious questions about why what happened actually happened and whether we might not have been better led by our politicians, we might – just might – make the same mistakes again. Dawn Purvis has started a debate. It is to be hoped, though I won’t hold my breath, that others might join that discussion. Is there, for example, a Catholic politician who might hold their hand up and suggest that mea culpa might be a couple of words that could wipe a slate clean?

The 22nd report of the IMC confirms that the most responsibility for violence in Northern Ireland lies with loyalists. And yet this week’s story is the usual republican threat. The devil is in the detail, however. The report shows that casualties of violence by loyalists – shootings and assaults – number 38 in the past year, a 245% increase on the previous year. Casualities of republican shootings and assaults number 25, up by 56%.

These figures indicate some very worrying trends: loyalist gangsterism is rife, dangerous and productive, and dissident sects have murdered members of the security forces at a time when diplomats and politicians in Washington, London, Dublin and not least Belfast are desperate to get unionists and republican parties to sign up to “normal” policing.

Though it should be noted that on kill rates, it is the republican dissenters from the Belfast and St Andrews Agreements who pose the greater threat…

And Liam Clarke in the Newsletter wonders why Peter Robinson has upped the ante on policing and by including the Parades Commission as a dead breaker:

Senior members of both Sinn Fein and the DUP who have assured me there could be a real crunch coming. Yet these are two issues about which there have been no demonstrations, no mass petitions and no threats of violence.

They are seldom mentioned except by the politicians and commentators who operate within the Stormont bubble. It is hard to see how the devolution of policing became such a republican cause that Sinn Fein held up Executive meetings for five months over the head of it.

Whatever happens, the Chief Constable will retain operational independence and the Policing Board will hold his force accountable. The minister will do little more than administer the budget, though there may be more work on the justice side. When Sinn Fein and the British government made it such a big issue that gave the DUP leverage which Peter Robinson used to extract concessions.

And:

So why, at the last moment, did Robinson elevate the abolition of the Parades Commission, long a policy objective, into a deal breaker? Statistics would suggest it isn’t such a do or die issue as all that. The Omnibus Survey, conducted by the NI Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) shows growing acceptance of the Commission. Just over half the population (56 per cent) now believe that the Commission has improved the situation overall compared to 20 per cent in 2001. For Protestants alone, approval for the Commission has gone up from eight per cent in 2001 to 39 per cent this year.

That is a fivefold increase and it is on a rising trend. People have other concerns. Membership of the loyal orders is falling and parading causes less trouble each year.

Another sham fight? Not exactly. It’s all to do with nursing the base. The DUP is focused on minimising the damage it will sustain in next year’s general election. With Sinn Fein its more to do with esoteric concerns about the man with executive oversight of the cops is ‘Irish’, and that bond of trust between the corporate body of the Ard Fheis and the Ard Comhairle it has thus far been unable to redeem.

And it is probably also something to do with the very conservative nature of the beast born of the Belfast and St Andrews Agreements. The embarrassing truth is that it is majority and minority rule for anything that anyone wants to get down. The mutual veto creates a deterrent to either partner wanting to race ahead without the other…

And one that probably ensures the government by quango will continue long into the future. For a commission who’s first chair promised his job was to lead it into a situation where it was no longer needed, that in lieu of a determined and joint political leadership, the Parades Commission, like the poor, will always be with us. Whether we like it - or whether it is a good thing - or not.