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Peace, at a price
By McGreevy
Bertie Ahern’s refusal to take calls from Gerry Adams would be comical if it was not so serious.
Ahern was on holidays last week and is in China this week on a trade mission. Either way, he is letting Adams stew and Adams has behaved like a petulant teenager.
“After 10 years the least I thought, if we are into this serious juncture, is that Bertie Ahern would have lifted the phone, as he has done numerous times, and said, ‘Gerry, A, B and C’”, Adams complained last week.
By accident or design, the Taoiseach’s actions has signalled his sense of betrayal and disgust at the mendacity of Sinn Féin/IRA.
Ten days ago he gave an interview to RTÉ’s This Week programme in which he effectively accused the Sinn Féin leadership, whom he had dealt with in good faith for so long, of knowing about and sanctioning the Northern Bank robbery.
“I am upset quite frankly that in the period, when we were in intensive talks trying to get a comprehensive agreement, that my information is now that people in very senior positions would have known what was going on,” he said.
So matter-of-factly did he deliver this bombshell and without a hint of rancour or betrayal in his voice that its impact wasn’t immediately apparent.
Unlike the rest of us, the Taoiseach cannot afford to grandstand or complain of hurt feelings, not when he has invested so much time in the peace process and when so much is at stake.
Diplomacy prevents him from saying what he really means which is: “You, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness knew that the IRA was planning this robbery and you did nothing about it.
“You sat across from me for months negotiating. All the time, your people were engaged in planning serious criminal activity. How can I ever trust you again?”
Suddenly, the optimism which surrounded the lead-up to the negotiations last year that ended on December 8 seems so misguided.
We know already the Chief Constable of the PSNI, Hugh Orde, has said the Provisional IRA did it. So does Ahern, based on the intelligence given to him by the gardaí.
According to reports in a Sunday newspaper, which are ominous if they are true, the raid was sanctioned by the IRA Army Council which includes McGuinness and Adams.
The pair went along with it because the alternative was a return to an IRA bombing campaign in Britain.
There are two words that will propel the British and Irish Governments into continuing to deal with Sinn Féin, however distasteful that may be post the Northern Bank raid: “Canary Wharf”.
Ahern said as much in the same interview in which he accused Sinn Féin of betrayal. “We don’t want to go back to a period of violence and instability. Ultimately, we all have to big enough to keep the peace process going forward.”
Sinn Féin knows that the veiled threat which the IRA represents is still the one thing that concentrates the minds of the two Government and will keep them coming back to the negotiating table even if sense and decency suggest otherwise.
Martin McGuinness was on the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost last Sunday making threats to that effect about the implications of possible sanctions on his party.
“I think then they’re on to very dangerous ground which would clearly send a message to many nationalists and republicans that politics doesn’t work.”
Note those last three words. They are not the words of a real democrat, no more than the interview Gerry Adams gave to Village magazine at the weekend.
He repeatedly denied the IRA were involved in the Northern Bank robbery — he would, wouldn’t he — but he said if anybody had information, they should convey it to a “respected member of the community”.
Adams doesn’t elaborate on who these people are or what would be the implications of conveying such information, but we can guess.
Two “punishment shootings” have been carried out by the Provos this month, along with the abduction of a member of the Real IRA.
The Northern Bank raid has achieved one good thing in overshadowing the launch of Sinn Féin’s 100th anniversary celebrations this year.
Gerry Adams keynote speech at the Mansion House last Friday was full of the same sanctimonious, self-serving guff we are likely to have to endure for the rest of the year.
He persisted in equating Sinn Féin with the 1916 rebellion (it was a mistake perpetuated by the British authorities at the time. Sinn Féin did not radicalise until 1917).
We will hear more of this for the rest of the year as Sinn Féin embark, ominously, on a recruitment drive and an “education” programme to tell the public at large what they are really about.
We don’t need any education. We already know.
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