Jonathan Powell – who was Downing Street chief of staff throughout Tony Blair’s premiership - has said the “heartless murders” perpetrated by dissident republicans “have no political significance” and do not mark the rebirth of the Troubles.
At the same time, however, he has confessed the “worry” that the reaction to them “might make the deaths a turning point they do not need to be”.
In a newspaper article written following the murder of two British soldiers in Antrim on Saturday – and before the killing of Constable Stephen Carroll in Craigavon on Monday night – Mr Powell explained the Blair government’s support for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as they had sought “to carry the Republican movement into peace as intact as possible”.
Instead of trying to encourage splits, as previously, Mr Powell said London wanted “to make peace once, not many times with different groups” and “to ensure that a capable and credible terrorist movement was not left behind”.
The establishment of the new power-sharing Executive by the DUP and Sinn Féin in 2007 delivered that outcome, Mr Powell told Guardianreaders.
“The splinter movements left behind …… have no political significance and no political mandate,” he said: “They speak for no one and for no part of the community. Their murders are just that – murders, and not political acts. There is no groundswell of support behind them and any of the things they might demand can be argued for politically in Northern Ireland without hindrance.”
The only thing that “could change the emptiness of these acts”, Mr Powell said , “is the way in which we react”.
What turned the Easter Rising into a mass movement was the reaction of the British government: “It is always the repression of terrorists that leads to sympathy and support for them. And terrorists know that provocation will work.
Terrorist atrocity is followed by reprisal, and then by counter-reprisal, which leads to full-scale conflict.”
That would not happen this time, said Mr Powell: “These murders will be dealt with by the security forces and by the entire population of Northern Ireland as a crime, not a political act.”
The other way in which there was risk of turning the situation “into more than a personal tragedy” was “by trying to make more of it than it is”.
Again, argued Mr Powell, this was what the terrorists craved: “If the British media make the splinter groups sound significant it will flatter them. They will feel that they are indeed important. So these events should be seen in context, and not inflated.”
The leaders of Sinn Féin would face “a difficult task”.
Mr Powell continued: “They must condemn the murders, and they must call for justice, but we should not make their task more difficult by jumping up and down on their historic sensibilities. This is a time for people to pull together, rather than trying to reintroduce old divisions.”