Out of sight, out of mines

The IRA's arms

Sep 29th 2005 BELFAST
From The Economist print edition

The IRA has destroyed its arsenal. Promise

HOW can you know something has been destroyed when you don't know what it is? The answer determined the reception of the news this week that the IRA had at last put a huge quantity of guns, missiles and explosive “beyond use”.

It was hardly a straightforward operation. John de Chastelain, a retired Canadian general appointed ten years ago to clear Northern Ireland of weaponry, and his colleagues, who included a Finn, an American and a couple of priests (one Protestant, the other Catholic, naturally), logged weapons and explosives over several weeks at several dumps, then supervised the operations that disabled them.

But neither the clerics nor the experts would say what had been destroyed or how. General de Chastelain pointed to intelligence that confidently listed rifles (varying from 500 to 1,000), heavy machine-guns (20-30), Semtex (2-3 tonnes), and surface-to-air missiles.

The general said the IRA had assured him this was their entire armoury. The state of the ammunition—variously loose, in belts, or the original packaging—supported intelligence that weaponry had been gathered willy-nilly into central dumps from all over Ireland. Some could not be traced because its minders had died, some had gone to dissident groups. Nobody, the general said, could be sure if the IRA had kept any weapons back.

The uncertainty did not much bother the British, Irish and American governments, which have backed the process. They concluded that a secret army claiming the right to bear arms until Ireland was reunited had given up its weapons without securing its goal. The gesture alone convinced them that republicans have converted to wholly political methods.

Not so the Reverend Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, who scoffed at the “falsehood of the century”. For him the lack of video, photographs and inventory rendered the exercise valueless. Mr Paisley was irked that the cleric of his choice had been passed over for a well-known liberal. He fastened on the uncertainty as proof of conspiracy to defraud unionists, insisting that the IRA had given their arms to dissidents. The threat now, he said, was from “all these other armies”.

Yet, after recent rioting by Protestant paramilitaries who have killed scores in the past ten years, Mr Paisley's scepticism sounded like a substitute for political engagement. The armies in whose weaponry Mr Paisley has shown least interest are the illegal Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA). One UDA spokesman, calling the IRA move irrelevant, said loyalists would keep their guns while the Union was in danger, a favourite Paisley phrase.

An international monitoring body set up at unionist insistence to detect paramilitary activity will report on the IRA in October and January. If it finds no criminal or paramilitary activity, the governments will press the DUP to negotiate power-sharing with Sinn Fein. The only internal pressure on Mr Paisley may be his own party's ambition, and perhaps the desire at the age of 80 to hold power at last, even if it must be shared with the enemy.

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