Another bloody chapter ends
IF EX-IRA LEADER IS BOUND FOR HELL, HE’LL HAVE PLENTY OF ENGLISH COMPANY
The English gutter press was happy to know t hat he was dead. The Daily Mail proclaimed, The World Is Cleaner Without This Butcher, and presented its readers with two pages of gruesome bombing- aftermath photographs. The Sun: IRA Killer Can Go To Hell, Say Families.
But if it is to hell that Martin McGuinness is bound, then the 66- year- old Irish Republican Army commander, key figure behind the 1998 Good Friday peace and power- sharing agreement and former Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, is in the company of quite a few Englishmen headed that way, too, and for exactly the same reasons.
The former Colonel Derek Wilford, 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, f or i nstance. Wilford was the commanding officer who ordered his soldiers to charge into a crowd of demonstrators in Londonderry’s besieged Bogside district, on Jan. 30, 1972. The day came to be called Bloody Sunday because Wilford’s soldiers proceeded to shoot 26 unarmed civilians, killing seven teenagers and six adults. Only a few months before Bloody Sunday, the same regiment murdered 11 unarmed civilians over a three- day period in Belfast’s Ballymurphy district.
But you will not find the 1 st Battalion, Parachute Regiment on any government list of terrorist entities, and unlike McGuinness, Col. Wilford was never shut away in a prison or blackguarded in headlines in the Daily Mail. Only a few months after Bloody Sunday, Wilford was awarded an Order of the British Empire, “in recognition of distinguished services in Northern Ireland.”
Then there are the senior officers with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the British Army’s Force Research Unit and MI5 who recruited, colluded with and in some cases directed loyalist Protestant terror gangs in the targeting and assassination of republican Catholic activists and civilians.
The 2003 findings of inquiries headed by former London Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens, and the 2012 inquiry run by Sir Desmond de Silva into the murder of civil- rights lawyer Pat Finucane, identified perhaps “dozens and dozens” of murders carried out in this way. Sometimes, the murders were random acts of sectarian savagery, like the murder of six Catholic men while watching a World Cup football match in a pub.
One Forces Research Unit agent, Brian Nelson, was simultaneously serving as the “chief intelligence officer” of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, which the British government didn’t get around to listing as a terrorist organization until 1992. Nelson was found to have been responsible for the murders of 30 Catholics.
Off- duty British soldiers and police officers engaged in terror attacks on behalf of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commando group. They traded around arms and intelligence in an ongoing bloodletting of anti- Catholic state terror and pogrom that by 1969 had already all but crushed the hopes of a nonviolent civil rights movement that had sprung up on behalf of Northern Island’s disenfranchised Catholics. Of 210 loyalist paramilitary members arrested following the Stevens inquiries, all but three were British secur- ity assets. Nearly 200 Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers ended up convicted of terrorist offences.
It is this story, these evidences of a system so filthy and corrupt from bottom to top, from Ballymena to 10 Downing Street, that is so conveniently and routinely elided in the ordinary narration of “The Troubles.” It is what makes one sick to one’s stomach with all the loud professions of moral outrage, umbrage- taking and protests over the condolences and the kindnesses now being offered to the McGuinness family by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the widow of the reformed Protestant demagogue and mob- inciter Ian Paisley, and even Queen Elizabeth herself.
The point here is not to draw false equivalences, or to recapitulate the recent record of a centuries- long tradition of British wickedness in Ireland, or to absolve McGuinness by way of whataboutism or to excuse him for the atrocities he cannot but have colluded with or ordered or even personally committed. McGuinness spent a great deal of his life “in active service.” In 1970, he was second in command of the IRA in Londonderry, at the age of 20, and he was the IRA’s chief of operations by the late 1970s.
You could say his strategy of creating an effective “liberated zone” along the border between the Irish Republic and the Six Counties was a stroke of guerrilla- strategy genius. But you would also have to say that the campaign degenerated i nto bloody ethnic cleansing by murder and terror aimed at the outlying Protestant enclaves of Fermanagh, South Tyrone and South Armagh.
It is also true, as his detractors never tire of pointing out, that he never apologized for the part he played in Ulster’s agonies. As he told a special criminal court in Dublin in 1973, when he was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison for membership in an outlawed organization: “I am a member of the Derry Brigade of the IRA and I am very, very proud of it.” He died proud of it.
The Irish tradition of “physical force republicanism,” celebrated in soaring patriotic poetry, in unbearably maudlin pub ballads, and in the paddywhackery of Hollywood movies, has tended to accrue to itself a cultish blood- sacrifice quality that can take on a patina of heroism. It can drive a person mad. At the same time, Northern Ireland in the 1970s was a hideous disfigurement of the United Kingdom. A half- century earlier it had been explicitly established as “a Protestant government for a Protestant people.” Its entire political and economic system depended upon grinding the faces of the Catholic poor, and constant, ritualized humiliations of the native Irish.
That was the system that McGuinness committed himself to destroy: a tyrannical, gerrymandered six- county statelet that could make for itself no democratic claim to a rightful monopoly on violence, and could not avail itself of any greater justification for its savagery than the IRA could claim for its own.
After British prime mini ster Edward Heath and Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner embarked on a strategy of rounding up republican suspects and jailing them by internment without trial in 1971, and after Bloody Sunday in 1972, there was no turning back. If Sinn Fein l eader Gerry Adams was the republican movement’s brain, McGuinness was its heart, and by the 1980s, after the debilitating trauma of a hunger strike campaign in which 10 republican prisoners starved themselves to death, in vain, Adams and McGuinness understood that the armed struggle had degenerated into ugly and pointless sectarian slaughter.
The 1998 Good Friday agreement came at the cost of more than 3,600 lives, half of them taken by the IRA’s bullets and bombs. But now that Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union threatens the return of a “hard border” between the Six Counties and the Irish Republic, and with the recent collapse of Northern Ireland’s unity government in an election that put the Unionist camp in the minority for the first time in a century, the optimism and goodwill of Good Friday is fading fast.
Whatever follows from here, events will unfold without Martin McGuinness. Another vexed and inglorious chapter in Irish history will come to an end.
EVIDENCES OF A SYSTEM SO FILTHY AND CORRUPT.