De Chastellain had discretion

For Tom Luby in The Blanket, the blame lies with General John de Chastellain, and a last minute feint from the IRA to keep internal dissent to a minimum. He argues that the General was not officially bound by any statutary obligations, but kept quiet at his own discretion.

Having created expectations of a �transparent� act of decommissioning, one in which sufficient detail would be given to convince his most doubting supporters, the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble felt obliged to call a halt to the sequence. To do otherwise was to invite disaster in the new elections. He had, he said, been promised transparency by Martin McGuinness (inadvertently revealed by a confused and exhausted General de Chastelain at his press conference last week as his IRA interlocutor) but had been betrayed.

Most damagingly, if true, he accuses John de Chastellain of misinterpreting the two confidentiality clauses that govern his ability to lay all details open to public scrutiny.

So why did he claim that he was bound by confidentiality? The answer, now emerging from the international decommissioning body, is that General de Chastelain made a private agreement with P O�Neill, the effect of which was to apply the confidentiality clause of the 1998 scheme, that is paragraph 26, to his dealings with the IRA.

He needn�t have done so. There was no legal requirement on him to do so. It was an entirely discretionary act by him. He could have told P O�Neill�s human manifestation, Brian Keenan, or his successor, Martin McGuinness, to get stuffed, that the decommissioning process needed credibility and transparency if it was to succeed and that he needed to publish a full list of every weapon, every bullet and ounce encased in concrete in order to persuade Unionists that the IRA was really ending its war. If the IRA didn�t like it they could lump it and Gerry Adams would have to do without his Stormont Executive.

This raises all manner of questions about the General’s handling of his role as an honest broker. But in any case, if David Trimble’s party lose this election badly enough, it may be the last time we heard of the General and the decommisioning issue.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty