The Leader | 12 March 2005

The latest crime-fighting proposal from the IRA is so boneheaded, so stunning in its stupidity, so stereotypically moronic, that if it had not come from a bunch of thugs and killers we might be tempted to say that it is almost sweet. The sisters of Robert McCartney, who was murdered in a Belfast bar, are about to visit America, the IRA’s most profitable fundraising territory, in a campaign to bring his killers to justice. They want the many witnesses to his murder to be able to testify free from the death threats already issued by the IRA. To judge by the slogans appearing on the walls of some Republican housing estates, so do a good number of the IRA’s traditional supporters. And what is the IRA’s response? On reflection, says the IRA, the killing of Mr McCartney may have been misjudged. But to allay the disgust generated by his killing we will of course take action — by murdering his murderers! They comically stipulate that the killers will be cleanly shot — rather than meet the fate of Mr McCartney, who was beaten with iron sewer rods, slashed from his neck to his navel, kicked, and had his head stamped on, by IRA supporters.

The most remarkable thing about the IRA’s statement is that anyone should express surprise. The Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy reacted as though Mother Teresa had been revealed as a drug-runner. The government well knows that the IRA’s programme of killings and punishment beatings has continued unabated throughout the ‘peace process’; it is merely the bombs in Oxford Street which have been suspended. Yet ministers have turned a blind eye to the lot. They carried on releasing prisoners, inviting Sinn Fein leaders to photo opportunities in Downing Street, and even briefly installed former terrorists in Northern Ireland’s government in spite of the obvious and growing evidence that IRA/Sinn Fein (for no one can claim they are not one and the same thing) had no intention of changing its spots.