Dean Godson says that this week’s murders have yielded impressive displays of cross-party unity. But they also draw attention to Northern Ireland’s vulnerability to terrorist attack, and the risks that were always inherent in the dismantling of the Province’s security structure
‘After they die, they will be forgotten, just as the policemen and soldiers who died are forgotten after a while, except by those who loved them.’ So said Florence Cobb, widow of RUC Inspector Harry Cobb, murdered in Lurgan by the Provisional IRA in 1977. I recalled those simple but powerful words when I heard that Constable Stephen Paul Carroll had been murdered by dissident Republicans on Monday night — just five miles away in Craigavon, Co. Armagh.
I had a horrible sense of déjà vu — not just about the murders themselves, but also about the near uniform reaction to them. I can remember a time when there was a consensus about the wickedness of murdering RUC officers — save among Republicans, whose electoral support was anyhow negligible in the pre-Hunger Strikes era. In other words, not too different to the dissidents of today.
Inspector Cobb never lived to see the force he died for altered beyond recognition under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement — and the man who was then convicted of his killing subsequently became a much respected member of the Sinn Fein negotiating team. If past form is anything to go by, the indignation of the political and official classes will blow over quickly enough.
But has the current power-sharing executive changed all that — with the DUP First Minister Peter Robinson and the Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness flanking the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde, in a remarkable display of cross-community solidarity? McGuinness’s description of the dissident Republicans as ‘traitors’ to the cause of Ireland inevitably commanded the greatest attention. But in its own way, Robinson’s formulation was no less striking: ‘This is a battle of wills between the political class and the evil gunmen — the political class will win.’
No sentimentalism there about ‘people power’ winning the day — which formed so prominent a part of Tony Blair’s discourse after the Real IRA bombing of Omagh in 1998. The Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart — whose writings on divided societies influenced the thinking of British and Irish officials during the Troubles — would instantly have recognised this ‘top-down’ feature of the current arrangements: the mutual accommodation of sectarian elites to ‘manage’ a conflict that neither side can win on its own terms.
A key part of that, of course, is managing your own side. Thus, at the first bilateral between David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein in September 1998 — what a big deal that was then — McGuinness stated: ‘It was Sinn Fein and Republicans who stopped the Real IRA, not British or Irish legislation.’ Can the Adams-McGuinness generation of Republicans continue to do so — acting, as their internal critics allege, as a kind of ‘Next Steps Agency’ for the British government?
The British government, for the moment, is confident that Adams and McGuinness can pull off this trick — at least so long as they continue to be given a ‘narrative’ to sell to their own tribe. Hence the haste with which it sought to push the devolution of policing and justice to the Northern Ireland Assembly through Parliament earlier this week. But the government also reckons that the strength of McGuinness’s condemnation has afforded Robinson enough space to push ahead with devolution of policing and justice within his party and community — subject to the usual caveats about timing and, of course, assuming there are no more attacks.
The big question now is whether the dissidents can maintain the momentum. The Joint Intelligence Committee recently discussed whether this was the start of a major new campaign or the ‘death rattle’ of irredentist republicanism — and the balance of opinion came down more on the side of the latter. Senior officials on both sides of the Border reckon the dissidents might manage a few more attacks, but are still very far from panicking. Neither the scale of the raids, nor the technology employed, is yet deemed serious enough to warrant a major reversal of security ‘normalisation’.
Rather, the biggest problem for them is understanding the fissiparousness of the command structures of the dissident organisations: in that sense, they are more like the UDA than the Provisionals. In short, no one is quite so indelicate as to employ the infamous phrase attributed to Reginald Maudling in the early years of the Troubles — ‘an acceptable level of violence’; but the spirit of the former Conservative home secretary is alive and well in Whitehall.
After all, millions of pounds and much amour propre has been invested in ‘demilitarisation’ — including the civilianisation of the once heavily fortified ‘police estate’ (to be replaced by much touchier-feelier ‘police shops’); single officer patrolling; dramatic reductions in helicopter overflights; and the pulling down of watch towers in republican strongholds. The greatest sin in the eyes of the post Troubles mandarinate is ‘overreaction’ — which could push nationalists into the arms of the dissidents.
On the face of it, times are not propitious for a renewed push for Irish unity: the southern economy is in such dire shape that no ‘Free Stater’ could possibly contemplate paying for the costs of integrating over a million and a half people used to British levels of welfare payments. Tony Blair’s prediction in his first speech as Prime Minister, in Belfast in May 1997, is looking more plausible by the minute: ‘None of us in the hall today, even the youngest, is likely to see Northern Ireland as anything but a part of the United Kingdom.’
Viewed in the round, optimists might say that even if these attacks continue for as long as the Border Campaign of 1956-62, they will be just as futile — and will peter out in ignominy. And co-operation between the Garda Siochana and the Police Service of Northern Ireland has never been closer — personified by the visit of the commissioner and deputy commissioner, Facthtna Murphy and Martin Callinan to their PSNI counterparts in Belfast on Thursday. As far as the British are concerned, any failings by the government of the Republic relates to lack of resources, not lack of will on the part of the Garda.
So much for the credit side of the ledger. But what of the debit column? Senior security officials state that they never thought they would live to see the day when they miss the presence of Brian Keenan, one of the Provisionals’ most ruthless commanders, who died last May at the age of 66. Despite his reputation as an irredeemable opponent of compromise, Keenan was wedded to the Adams-McGuinness strategy. With his demise, opine security sources, one of the last remaining restraints on a cadre of Provisionals disillusioned with the political game at Stormont may have been removed. And which of them has or will gain access to the ‘small quantities’ of weapons ‘held back by local groups in defiance of the instructions of their leaders’ to decommission — ominously alluded to in the remarks of the Leader of the Lords, Lady Royall, in the statement on the killings in the Upper House?
No one doubted the supreme skill with which Adams and McGuinness finessed ‘the movement’ after the Omagh massacre. But they were helped then by the near parity in the casualty rates on that terrible day — almost exactly half Catholic, half Protestant. They were thus able to represent the Real IRA action as an attack on the entire process — not just one section of the population — and so to distance themselves from physical force republicanism.
Will they be able to continue in this vein if the bulk of the casualties are inflicted upon either the hated British army or the PSNI? And now that it is know that the slain policeman was a Catholic officer (albeit killed ‘accidentally’ in this instance) what will be the effect on Catholic recruitment to the PSNI — running on target at 25 per cent of the force, and scheduled to rise to 30 per cent by 2011? Will they go the way of the early Catholic recruits to the Ulster Defence Regiment — which rose to around 25 per cent in the early years of the Troubles, and then plummeted to 3.7 per cent in the face of deliberate targeting by Republicans?
How will the post-Agreement security system stand up to sustained attack from a renewed terrorist campaign? Sir Hugh Orde and the PSNI have earned much praise in official quarters for stymying the growing number of dissident attacks in recent years. On his flying visit to Belfast, Gordon Brown vowed that the killers would be brought to justice; Sir Hugh was more measured, merely pledging to leave no stone unturned. For the Chief Constable knew he could give no such guarantee.
The PSNI feels that its efforts have not always been well rewarded by the operation of the criminal justice system — not least the rules governing the disclosure of prosecution materials to the defence. These are more exacting in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the Kingdom; indeed, in its latest report issued last November, the International Monitoring Commission suggested that the Criminal Justice Inspectorate look at this issue in a future inquiry.
Above all, terrorist campaigns are won and lost through intelligence. But much of the official culture of the new Northern Ireland is deeply hostile to one of the key tools of the trade — informers. The Consultative Group of the Past — set up by then Ulster secretary Peter Hain in 2007 under the leadership of the former Church of Ireland Primate Lord Eames and Denis Bradley — is emblematic of this approach.
‘While the Group recognises that intelligence gathering is an integral part of security activity, the sense of oppression was even further increased by the numbers of people who were recruited by the state and induced to act as informers,’ opine the theologians. ‘The Group was told that a significant number of such agents were recruited, many more than was imagined at the time. Whatever service they did for the state, it was at a price to their own lives and the self-esteem within their own community.’
Senior officials are starting to wonder whether this sniffy approach is really sustainable if the balloon goes up once more. Were too many senior Special Branch officers, especially agent handlers, let go too quickly under the Patten report of 1999? Is it right that they be left to face the music before a set of costly inquiries? And were too many informers let go in the reviews of the early to middle years of this decade? Will any intelligence officers take the same kind of risks for state security that they did during the last round of Troubles?
Whitehall’s greatest concern is that the security system will be further stretched by yet another commitment. With the end of the Iraqi deployment in sight, the army, for one, was looking forward to concentrating its efforts on a single big commitment — Afghanistan. Now, if things get worse in Ulster, it will at least have to think of relocating some of its resources back to the Province, which it could well have done without. Nor, for political reasons, does it have the luxury of re-recruiting the Home Service Battalions of the old Royal Irish Regiment — which would be unacceptable to Irish nationalists. So if patrolling had eventually to be resumed, it would have to be with regular troops.
Likewise, the security services could well do without further surveillance capacity being transferred to Northern Ireland: its spanking new regional HQ in Holywood, Co. Down, was partly meant to be a back-up to substitute for Thames House in the event of a devastating chemical or biological attack on London. Once again, the old Irish nationalist adage, ‘England’s danger is Ireland’s opportunity’, is coming into play — even if the apolitical militarists of Real IRA and Continuity IRA did not necessarily intend it that way.