For the first time in 80 years, the people of Ireland tomorrow vote together on their future. That we have got so far is indeed a miracle, and confounds a great deal of what I repeatedly predicted; which is good. Being shown to be wrong when you have offered a steady diet of gloom is mightily pleasing indeed. My delight at the Good Friday accord lifted my spirits at the time, and I wrote nice things about Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, and I will not unwrite that which I have written. But the issue is not about individuals, and never was. It is about historical movements, about powerful familial cultures, about profound senses of identity, about public, often taunting, celebrations of tradition, and about the righteous resort to violence which abolishes reason as swiftly as it takes life. We should not have needed the return of the Balcombe Street gang to remind us of the central realities of what Sinn Fein stands for, what it is, how it thinks; but we did. By God we did.
Personal liberation
Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, Sean Lemass and Sean McBride are just a few of the individuals who made the journey from that perverse and morally delinquent Sinn FeinIRA culture which sees no ethical disorder in violence, and which discerns only victimhood in its own condition. Each achieved the personal liberation which results from abandoning violence, and each actually increased the freedom of the Irish people by that abandonment.
For the greatest serfdom in this country, throughout this century, has been the enslavement by the gun. The gun intoxicates, it thrills, it weaves enchantment upon those who bear it, it glorifies, in their own eyes, those who use it. It is addictive, and only those who have used the gun would have been given the rhapsodic response which was given to the IRA killers at the Sinn Fein special ard fheis the other weekend.
And here lies my problem. That devotion to the gun is a core-cultural value of Sinn Fein-IRA. It is as vital to the existence of that tradition as fields are to cattle farming. Their real heroes are not the peace-makers, not the trojan workers who toiled that the killing may stop, not the nurses who nursed the shattered bodies, or the doctors who repaired the broken limbs - but the opposites of those people, the men and women who have killed.
The Balcombe Street gang was the worst and the most abominable of the units the IRA unleashed on London. It specialised in spreading terror amongst the uninvolved. Merely to eat in a good restaurant turned innocent people into legitimate targets; to drink in a pub where off-duty soldiers, in their own country, also drank, was to risk death. This was homicide at its most random, its most nihilistic, its most profoundly immoral. It was violence for violence's sake. Those whom the Balcombe Street gang caused to die were not just the dozen or so they actually killed, but those who died because one of the greatest cancer specialists in the world was one of their victims.
"These men are our Mandelas," said Michael O'Brien - who is serving a sentence for attempted murder - at the ard fheis as he welcomed the Balcome Street heroes. "They are fit and strong, unbowed and unbroken, humorous, politically astute, and they still believe in unity after 23 years in the belly of the beast." And of course there was uproar.
Light becomes dark
Such gibberish does not require refutation, for how can one possibly refute a statement in which all the ordinary meanings within human communication are stripped of value, and words are rendered almost meaningless? Gravity becomes anti-gravity; light becomes dark; to be a killer is to be a victim; to be murdered is to convey legitimacy upon those who murdered you.
It is bizarre, yet the words are useful, because they are the quintessential distillate of the Sinn Fein philosophy. Boil down all that you hear from Sinn Fein-IRA, and the liquid you have at the bottom is what Michael O'Brien said to those soon-to-be-ecstatic Sinn Fein supporters. It is the key sentiment to their existence and the fuel which has powered the moral engine of carnage and destruction through the decades, and which drives Sinn Fein-IRA unrepentant into the future.
I truly believe that Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams want a settlement and an end to violence. I said they didn't before, and I am now convinced that I was wrong. But merely wishing for something is not enough; and in the democratic world they now wish to inhabit, awareness of how those who are not your immediate allies will react to what you do must be a guide to your actions. It seems that the Sinn Fein leadership has not even learned that much.
Moral authority
They have made a rod, and that rod will first of all be for the back of David Trimble; I pray it lands softly tomorrow and the No vote is overwhelmed by the Yes. I fear that the No vote will be substantial and that even if there is a Yes majority in the North, it will not be enough to confer a compelling moral authority on the Good Friday accord. And then the rod will fall on the Sinn Fein leadership. We know that simple majoritarianism doesn't work in the North; yet on the other hand, all-party agreements are impossible. No shopping basket can accommodate all the political groceries in the Northern supermarket. The UKU and the DUP are already out of the basket. Even if Sinn Fein-IRA can shut up over the next 24 hours, is it not likely that sooner or later that it will revert to type, so brutally exhibited at the ard fheis, and scare the unionists out of the basket for good? In other words, is it possible to reconcile the cultures of unionist orangery and of green gun-worship? It is not.
Complete solutions do not work. They are attempts to make submarines which double as orbiting television satellites. The Sinn Fein leadership must soon do as others have done before, and lead its followers away from the gun, leaving it to the mad, crooning guardians who have minded it down the years, and who always will.