The War’s Over   Who Knew?

SUPPOSING the IRA ended its war and nobody noticed? That, apparently, is what happened on Tuesday, October 21 when Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams made the following statement”

“Sinn Fein’s position is one of total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences . . . we are opposed to any use of force for any political purpose.”

After that statement the IRA then issued their own statement. “The leadership of the IRA welcomed today’s speech by Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams in which he accurately reflects our position,” it said in part. 

Hello world. To anyone listening or reading out there, this can only mean one thing. The IRA welcoming a speech and agreeing with it that the use of force, or the threat of force, is no longer tenable is an historic development of extraordinary importance.

Anyone watching the Republican movement over the years knows that every sentence is parsed and analyzed before being released, and there can be no mistaking what these words mean.

If we had written 10 years ago that the IRA would make such a statement and, in addition, decommission up to one-third of its arsenal, we would probably have been told to apply to the nearest insane asylum. Such an eventuality would never have been on anyone’s radar.

But if we also added in that the leaders of Ulster Unionism would reject the statement and the decommissioning, despite their decades old insistence that the only problem was IRA violence, then that too would have been offered at incredible odds.

Yet that is what happened on Tuesday, October 21. The facts are that the focus on the style of the decommissioning, not the act itself or the IRA statement, is an extraordinary oversight by all concerned on this issue.

History will bear out that the nature of the IRA statement on October 21 will be far more important than the brouhaha over what the IRA did or did not decommission.

The media, of course, was off chasing its tail that the information about the style of decommissioning was much more important than any statement the IRA made or weapons destroyed. It’s a bit like reporting there was a more important story somewhere else on that day in Dallas in November 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was shot.

The scapegoat in all of this has become General John de Chastelain, the Canadian officer appointed to oversee the issue of decommissioning weapons.

General de Chastelain has been widely and very unfairly castigated for his statements at his press conference. In his remarks he did not “sex up,” to use the British term, the nature and extent of the decommissioning of weapons which he had just witnessed.

He was sticking to the letter of the arrangement as agreed between all sides to the Good Friday Agreement that he would respect the confidentiality of any paramilitary group which rid itself of its weapons.

This was agreed to by the Ulster Unionists, but magically that ground rule, like so many other, has suddenly been seen to disappear. 

No wonder the world is left confused by what happened on October 21st. The reality, however, is that Unionism turned down an incredible deal. They may learn to regret that.