No place for 'mean-mindedness' as IRA moves on decommissioning
Relentless pressure at home and anger in America over Sinn Féin's links to Colombian terror finally forced the IRA to do what it said it never would
From The Irish Times - 24th October 2001
By Stephen King
Closer to home, the IRA had reason to reverse its previous position on arms. Just as you "can't buck the market" so it is difficult to stand outside the media and political consensus. The Sinn Féin MP for West Tyrone, Pat Doherty, told the Boston Herald in 1999 that it would be "lunacy" to collapse the agreement even if IRA decommissioning had not happened as long as the institutions were up and running and the IRA ceasefire was holding.
The IRA had miscalculated. It had underestimated unionist determination on the guns-in-government issue. In a lonely and difficult decision, David Trimble had to bring it home to republicans how serious he was by resigning his position as First Minister.
Nationalist Ireland saw how much was at stake in terms of the new institutions, and republicanism could not afford to be seen as responsible for their collapse.
On Monday, Mr Adams implored the other actors not to minimise the significance of any IRA decommissioning move. "A positive IRA move must be responded to with generosity and vision," he told his west Belfast audience.
Certainly, this is not a time for mean-mindedness. Having set decommissioning as the standard by which the republican movement be judged, those who now seek to change the question will receive no quarter in London or Washington and will have no right to either.
There are signs that even anti-agreement unionists recognise that trifling over quantities and methods is not an adequate or intelligent response. The price paid for decommissioning has been high. It is fair too to point out that decommissioning was a British - not a unionist - invention.
But unionists seized upon it, rightly or wrongly, even when Downing Street seemed at pains to let it slide.
The pressure bore fruit. Now, having lived by decommissioning, it would be senseless of unionists to die by it. Above all, this is no time for loyalism to be found wanting.
Republicans bear much of the responsibility for the Troubles and for perpetuating them after any objective reason for violence had passed.
That is something republicans will have to live with. In part, they began to accept their historic responsibility yesterday.
An opportunity exists for people of goodwill to work together in a new Northern Ireland, each secure in his and her own identity. It is an opportunity that unionists should seize, leaving the de Chastelain commission to clear up the physical residue of a conflict that has no place in the new world order.
Steven King is a special adviser to the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble |
