Issue: 26 February
2005 |
PAGE 1 of 1
|
|
| Will Dublin turn on Gerry Adams?
Dublin
Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state
within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would
have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the
fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most
celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most
popular politician in the Irish Republic. His party seemed set fair
to make huge gains in the next Irish general election and he was
being widely talked of as the next president of this state. Even the
foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, spoke of the republicans as
potential partners in a future coalition.
Southerners have historically afforded the republican movement a
degree of latitude in operating up north. But woe betide republicans
who subvert the south: de Valéra hanged his former IRA comrades
during the second world war. Now that the extent of Sinn Fein/IRA’s
criminal empire is becoming apparent south of the border, the
constitutional parties of the 26 Counties have again taken fright
and have turned on the republicans with a vengeance.
The southern state’s anger found expression in last week’s Garda
Siochana raids across the Republic. Their proximate cause was an
attempt to find a portion of the £26 million stolen by republicans
last December in the raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast — but the
investigation seems now to range much wider. According to Garda
sources, this racketeering is not simply about personal enrichment
or even pension schemes for aging Provisionals. It is also a highly
sophisticated operation whose main aim is to help Sinn Fein/IRA
seize power. It includes spying on the private lives of Dail members
of rival parties in key target seats. Far from being a creative
sideline to redirect the Republican movement away from full-scale
terrorism, criminality gives Sinn Fein/IRA a major advantage in the
political arena.
British democracy is big enough to survive the indulgence of
paramilitary rackets in large chunks of Northern Ireland for the
sake of the peace process. It can also endure Long Good Friday-style
excursions by republican and loyalist gangs into the ‘manors’ of
mainland racketeers. But the Irish Republic is not large enough to
take so indulgent a view for very long. At stake now is how
long-lasting the breach between the Irish government and Sinn
Fein/IRA is going to be. And that will depend upon who has control
of this split — and to what end.
The Fianna Fail Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has plenty of reasons to
feel aggrieved with Sinn Fein/IRA, with whom he was negotiating in
good faith last December to restore Northern Ireland’s suspended
executive. All the while, key Sinn Fein figures were aware of the
impending Northern Bank robbery. And with his peerless nose for
popular opinion, Mr Ahern is profoundly conscious of the
near-unanimous revulsion in the Republic towards the proposed
release of the killers of Garda Jerry McCabe, a police officer shot
by republicans in Co. Limerick in 1996. Sinn Fein/IRA demanded their
release as the price of rejoining the Northern Ireland executive in
last December’s abortive negotiations. Mr Ahern was prepared to
indulge this request, in breach of a pledge to the widow. He does
not want to get burned again, especially now that the opposition
Fine Gael candidate in the forthcoming Kildare by-election has
demanded that all parties sign a pledge not to free the prisoners.
But nothing is ever simple in the tangled world of Fianna Fail.
Even more than Tony Blair, Mr Ahern feels the ‘hand of history’
pressing upon his shoulder to settle the affairs of Northern
Ireland. He does not want to close down lines of communication with
republicans. He pointedly declined to follow the justice minister,
Michael McDowell — who represents the militantly anti-republican
Progressive Democrats, the junior coalition partner — in naming
Adams, Martin McGuinness and the Dail member Martin Ferris as
members of the IRA’s Army Council. Instead, he declared that he did
not know who was a member of that body; those close to him aver that
he is not briefed on such matters on a day-to-day basis. Key figures
in the state wonder if all of the individual acts of criminality
really amount to a coherent plan of subversion. Anyhow, Mr Ahern
calculates that public opinion is fickle, and that by the middle of
2005 he could try and do an Ulster deal again. So he will surf the
current anti-Provisional mood in the Republic, without burning any
bridges.
Mr Ahern may have difficulty in pulling this trick off. The
complex investigations will go on for a long time under a militantly
apolitical Garda commissioner, Noel Conroy — who only briefed the
Taoiseach on them after the raid. Who knows where the trail might
lead and what might emerge each week? Already, one of Mr Ahern’s
closest associates, Phil Flynn, has been questioned by the Garda. Mr
Flynn is a former industrial troubleshooter turned businessman who
was once a vice-president of Sinn Fein. He has recently received a
commission to overhaul Sinn Fein’s organisation; the convicted IRA
terrorist, Brian Keenan, has been a visitor in his home. Senior
Irish officials state they have no idea whether the Taoiseach knew
of this connection with Mr Keenan, but are sure that if there had
been anything untoward in associating with Mr Flynn, the Garda would
have forewarned Mr Ahern. Indeed, Mr Flynn and Mr Ahern were spotted
in animated conversation as recently as early January, at the
funeral in Dublin of the father of a prominent trade unionist.
Sinn Fein/IRA will now try to continue to drive a wedge between
Mr Ahern and Mr McDowell. They are skilled at this kind of
operation: after the first suspension of Stormont in 2000 they
demonised the Ulster secretary, Peter Mandelson, and largely
exempted Mr Blair. Although the Taoiseach is sensitive to
accusations that he is letting the justice minister hang out to dry
— as exemplified by the Irish Independent leader of 22 February —
few who know Mr Ahern would want to rely upon him in this sort of
fight. And if the republicans can force out the justice minister,
they might also win the scalp of the Garda commissioner, too, with
incalculable consequences for Irish democracy.
As a senior British official observes, fudge is the most
addictive of narcotics in this process. In Mr Ahern’s case, fear
some younger Fianna Fail hacks, it could lead him to ‘do a John
Hume’: sacrifice his party for the sake of constitutionalising
republicanism. But will the true sovereigns in this Republic — the
Irish people — allow him to do so?
The paperback edition of Dean Godson’s Himself Alone: David
Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism will be published next month
(Harper Perennial, £12.99).
|