Unwelcome St Patrick's Day guests

Mar 15th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Leaders of Sinn Fein are being spurned in America over the IRA’s alleged involvement in the murder of a Belfast man and a huge bank robbery. But the Irish republican movement’s response suggests it still is not receiving the message that it must give up all forms of violence and criminality

FOR the first time in ten years, the leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), will not be attending the White House's annual St Patrick’s Day party, on Thursday March 17th. Nor will other Northern Ireland politicians. However, President George Bush will meet the family of a Catholic man, Robert McCartney, who was knifed to death in a Belfast bar in January, allegedly by members of the IRA in the presence of several leading Sinn Fein figures. Coming on top of a huge Belfast bank robbery in December, in which the IRA was the main suspect, this gruesome murder—and the IRA’s and Sinn Fein’s brutish response to it—have prompted fierce criticism from American, Irish and British political leaders. Most woundingly, even Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, a long-standing sympathiser of the Irish republican cause, has now refused a meeting with Sinn Fein’s leader, Gerry Adams, “given the IRA’s ongoing criminal activity and contempt for the rule of law,” as the senator’s office put it.

Just a fortnight before the bank raid, Northern Ireland had seemed to be on the brink of a breakthrough, in which militant parties from each side of the province’s long-running conflict would set aside their bitter enmity and join together in a fresh attempt at power-sharing. The leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, now the largest parties representing the province’s Protestant majority and Catholic minority respectively, would sit together to discuss such everyday matters as the running of local hospitals and schools. The IRA would finish disarming and its political wing would henceforth use exclusively democratic means in its campaign to unite the island of Ireland. The DUP would likewise pursue democratically its goal of maintaining Northern Ireland’s union with Britain. But a tentative deal unravelled over the issue on which the talks have continually stuck: evidence of the IRA’s disarmament.

Then, on December 20th, came the robbery, in which more than £26m ($50m) was taken from the headquarters of Northern Bank. The operation was conducted with such military-style precision that police and ministers on both sides of the Irish border were convinced that the IRA was the only plausible culprit. Despite Sinn Fein’s denials of any knowledge or involvement, Irish and British ministers were furious that the party’s leaders must have known it was being planned even as they negotiated the proposed power-sharing deal. Such was the level of anger that Ireland’s justice minister, Michael McDowell, abandoned the usual polite pretence that Sinn Fein and the IRA were separate organisations. He openly accused Mr Adams, as well as Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, and Martin Ferris, a Sinn Fein member of the Irish parliament, of belonging to the IRA’s Army Council (which, naturally, they denied).

The bank raid suggests that, despite actively negotiating an end to its armed struggle for a united Ireland, the IRA does not intend to go out of business—and indeed plans to retain its position as Northern Ireland’s biggest organised-crime operation. The IRA declared a ceasefire in its guerrilla campaign against British rule in 1997, and its political wing signed up to the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998 and won seats in an earlier attempt at power-sharing government, in 1999. But the IRA is widely believed to have gone on enriching itself through a variety of criminal enterprises. It is also accused of continuing to hand out beatings and other forms of rough “justice” in Catholic districts where Northern Ireland’s (still largely Protestant) police remain mistrusted.

McCartney’s slaughter, on January 30th, was an extreme but not unique example of the IRA’s continued willingness to resort to violence. But the courage of the victim’s family in demanding genuine justice, and taking their campaign to the media and even as far as the White House, has made it hard even for many republican sympathisers to continue turning a blind eye.

Faced with unusually public criticism from the McCartney family—who come from a Belfast district where seldom has anyone the will or courage to speak against the IRA—the militant group and its political wing were forced to try to limit the political damage. The IRA admitted that two of its members slashed McCartney in the neck and stomach, and expelled them and another member allegedly involved. Sinn Fein suspended seven of its members and urged witnesses to come forward. However, the McCartneys have continued to accuse the republican leadership of failing to do enough. Though around 70 people were in the bar during the stabbing—including, it now transpires, several Sinn Fein politicians—none apparently saw anything that might help the police.

Having so far failed to pacify the McCartneys with their expulsions, suspensions and exhortations, the IRA and Sinn Fein have now reverted to type. Last week the IRA said it had met the family and offered to shoot McCartney's murderers, in a statement which suggested surprise that its generous offer was turned down. On Monday, as the McCartneys prepared to travel to Washington—and amid speculation that they might stand as candidates against Sinn Fein in the forthcoming British parliamentary elections—Mr McGuinness gave broadcast interviews in which he warned them to be “very careful” not to step over the line into politics. To some, this sounded like a thinly veiled threat, though Mr McGuinness had said only that they risked losing public support.

The power-sharing Northern Ireland government proposed under the Good Friday agreement has been suspended since 2002. The uproar over the IRA’s continuing criminality has put the republican movement on the defensive and left those who support union with Britain feeling vindicated in their refusal to govern alongside the IRA’s political wing until it definitively abandons violence. IRA funding has been drying up in America but the views of American political leaders and of the 44m or so Americans claiming Irish roots still have clout in Ireland, north and south. The chilly reception Sinn Fein’s leaders are receiving in Washington this St Patrick’s Day may thus bring a little closer the day when the republican movement accepts that it cannot expect to be in government while letting some of its members rob and murder.

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