A deadly romance

For those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, there is a pungent but negative sense of time travel around New IRA statements. The New IRA spokesman is a ‘T. O’Neill’ — which, you might notice, is just a consonant and some bad blood away from the old Provisional IRA spokesman ‘P. O’Neill’ — and his sonorous words, like those of his predecessor, are carefully crafted to mask a sad, nasty reality.

The most recent one, in the aftermath of the New IRA murder of the journalist Lyra McKee, offered an ‘apology’ which stated that ‘in the course of attacking the enemy Lyra McKee was tragically killed while standing beside enemy forces’. As a fresh precaution, it said, ‘we have instructed our volunteers to take the utmost care in future when engaging the enemy’ (translation: when trying to murder police officers, remember not to fire wildly into a crowd of bystanders).

It was, to use the modern phrase, a case of ‘Sorry, not sorry.’ Not sorry for rioting, bringing guns back on to Derry streets or shooting at police. Sorry for itself, however, that as a result of killing a young, widely loved female journalist (rather than, say, a PSNI officer), the New IRA’s PR wing, Saoradh, is currently having a tougher time of it than usual. It is safe to say that when the organisation first egged on rioting in Derry’s Creggan estate, it did not imagine that the outcome would be a small group of courageous, angry women — friends of Lyra’s — stamping accusatory handprints in red paint on the front of the dissidents’ Derry headquarters before the world’s cameras while the baseball-capped representatives of the current ‘armed struggle’ looked on sullenly.

The gunman’s preferred outcomes would have been, singly or in combination: to murder or injure a police officer; to showcase the presence of serious firepower within New IRA ranks; or perhaps to draw some response from the police which could then be exploited for political gain.