Why the IRA Should Decommission.(Brief Article)

The exercise was cloaked in secrecy, but it probably went something like this. Two international dignitaries with no expertise in armaments pile into a car with blacked-out windows--or maybe they are blindfolded--and are driven by a wheel-man for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) to one arms dump, then another. In each place they are escorted around. They see that various light automatic weapons and the odd grenade launcher or heavy machine gun are padlocked, and as they are ushered back to the car note that the bunker containing the arms is locked behind them. Then they blithely report to an independent commission on decommissioning--as disarmament is called in Northern Ireland--that a minute portion of the IRA's arsenal is "safely beyond use."

Three such inspections have occurred since June 2000. This decommissioning-in-drag farce would be funnier if it didn't imperil the peace process, culminating in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, that has ratcheted down the level of violence in Northern Ireland by roughly 80 percent since 1994. Because the IRA has not relinquished a single bullet or renounced its habit of armed coercion, Ulster Unionist Party leader and Nobel Peace laureate David Trimble, an architect of the agreement, resigned as first minister of Northern Ireland's fledgling power-sharing devolved Assembly on July 1. If the decommissioning knot cannot be untied, the Assembly could perish and with it the agreement itself.

Yet Trimble's stance is hardly unreasonable. To unite Ireland on behalf of Northern Ireland's Catholic nationalist minority against the will of its Protestant unionist majority, the IRA has killed more than 1,800 people, roughly a third innocent civilians. In consideration for the IRA's conditional abstention from ritual political murder, unionists and the British government allowed 428 terrorists (including pro- British loyalists) to go free long before the end of their sentences, and paved the way for the evisceration and demoralization of a police force--the Royal Ulster Constabulary--that has lost more than 300 officers to republican terrorism.

But the IRA sees itself as uniquely noble. To the typical IRA man, purging Ireland of 800 years (give or take a few centuries) of abusive British rule and Protestant domination necessitated IRA brutality. The IRA was not defeated militarily, but has simply added politics to its arsenal. With a ballot-paper in his fist and an Armalite still slung over his shoulder, our IRA man is gradually fulfilling the republican destiny established with the 1916 Easter Rising: ...