In two days’ time, Northern Ireland will mark the 30th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday, the watershed event in the province’s recent history, when British soldiers opened fire on nationalist demonstrators, killing 13 of them. The result was a reinvigorated IRA and three decades of bloody terror, during which thousands were murdered and injured and tens of thousands, Catholics and Protestants, were intimidated into quitting their homes and resettling in confessional ghettos.
When last week the IRA made an apology to the families of those civilian victims, it was inevitable that it would be rejected by many as crocodile tears although others welcomed it as a substantial contribution to the peace process. It is both. That may seem a contradiction, but it is not. Hypocrisy is often the first step toward transformation. People do one thing but say another because they realize that their views — racist for example —are no longer politically or socially acceptable. The next step is that they begin, slowly, to change those opinions.
What motivated the IRA to issue the apology was political necessity. In both the Republic and Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, saw its support grow in the wake of the 1997 cease-fire agreement, largely as a result of the remarkable ability of its leaders, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, to grab the political agenda and present themselves in the best political light. But they have now lost the initiative. The IRA’s announcements of arms caches being put "beyond use" no longer impresses. With attention increasingly focused on republican beatings, intimidation, attempts to stir up riots and other breaches in spirit of the accord, and the peace process facing stalemate, Sinn Fein’s support is hemorrhaging on both sides — to the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP and to the Real IRA who want to go back to the armed struggle. The man who now has the initiative is Unionist leader David Trimble who has successfully presented himself as willing to go, not one, but many extra miles for peace but who can now do no more in the face of Sinn Fein/IRA’s continued two-timing. He has given the UK government until this Wednesday to say whether the IRA still involved in violence. If Tony Blair says it is, then Sinn Fein will be expelled from Northern Ireland’s power-sharing administration. Wednesday’s apology was designed to confuse the issue while reinforcing the point that the republicans are now committed to peace.
Sinn Fein and the IRA learned the hard way that the only way to achieve their vision of a united, republican Ireland is by political means. For that, they have to remain aboard the peace process and within the power-sharing administration. They need to prevent both expulsion and its collapse: either way they come out the losers: support will hemorrhage all the more. They reckon this apology, unprecedented for the IRA, will do the trick.
There is patently no regret on the IRA’s part. It did what it did. Now it wants to do something else. The apology is a means to future political activity. Yet that is cause for optimism. It indicates a different attitude on its part — and for that reason, the apology may just keep the Northern Irish administration afloat, and IRA aboard.
