Is a European War provoked by extreme Serbian nationalists once again, 85 years on, to coincide with a gathering Irish crisis? Events arising from the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo by Serb extremists halted the implementation of Home Rule in 1914 - and more importantly, took the attention of the greatest imperial power in the world away from the gathering Irish storm until that storm finally erupted. In 1999, is the attention of the greatest imperial power in the world, now 3,000 rather than 100 miles away, again to be fatally shifted away from here by Serb intransigence even as the hour of need once again beckons?
We ask these questions as jeering, unrepentant killers emerge from the doors of their open-access terrorist classrooms in the Maze, now fluent in Irish (or maybe even Lallans), well-schooled in the arts of homicide and of course, sooner than they expected, free to spread the virus of their skills into the broader community. We ask these questions as the murderers of young Stephen Restorick, killed by the monstrous internal injuries caused by the impact of a half-inch diameter anti-aircraft bullet moving at over half-a-mile a second, guffawed as sentence was passed on them, for they know full well that they will serve but one Christmas in jail before returning as heroes to their communities.
No remorse
There is no sign of remorse, no spreading culture of regret, no popular movement which declares: those things we did were wrong, they were morally unjustifiable, an affront to the religions in which we were raised and an insult to Irish civilisation of whatever kind. Instead, thousands must mourn the lives of loved ones cut short, and are told that the unexpiation of the anger they feel is the price to be paid for peace. If that is the price, then perhaps, so be it.
But what then if the price is paid but no peace returns? What then, as those who have been trained at Irish and British taxpayers' expense in the state-run paramilitary staff colleges in Portlaoise and Long Kesh, and who have been released on vapid, meaningless sort-of-undertakings, unsecured by signature or even handshake, in reality redirect their talents to the tasks of war? What then?
For just at the moment that political will in London and Washington should be focused on Northern Ireland, it has shifted once again to a decaying empire in the Balkans, with heaven knows what follies ahead. NATO does not love the Albanian people there half as much as the Serbs love the land they hold. Kosovo is the birthplace of their first patriarchate, font of their heroic myths and the home of the field where they tasted their bitterest defeat. In such a place, they will be disinclined either to surrender or to show mercy.
Serb revenge
Moreover, just as the Jews were held hostage against the aerially powerful but territorially impotent Western allies during the second World War, the hapless ethnic Albanians of Kosovo might well pay a frightful price exacted by Serb soldiers and irregulars in revenge for NATO air attacks. The air power of Lancasters in 1942 could not - and that of F-16s or Stealth bombers in 1999 cannot - prevent murder by knife and club. Air power could not even halt murder in Northern Ireland, where soldiers in helicopters could video soldiers on the ground being lynched alive. But air power can and probably will fix attention away from preoccupations with the North.
No peaceful democrats anywhere in Europe over the past 50 years have had to swallow the various pills delivered by paramilitaries and by governments as they have in the North. They have buried their dead, tended their graves, rebuilt lives from ruin and watched while deals were done to free the authors of their misery, even as those authors cockily declined to give assurances that the war was over.
Like many a doubter of the peace process, I rejoiced in the Good Friday Agreement and its endorsement by the electorates of Ireland. But last Easter no-one thought that the agreement, such as it was, would mean one year later that the laughing cavalier killers of the IRA might be allowed an unparoled freedom while arsenals remained beneath ground, nightly beatings continued and citizens who were unprotected by paramilitary membership could be expelled from home and country. No, no, no. That was not any part of the deal. It has been violated, systematically, by paramilitaries on both sides; and they have not felt even a breath of genuine government anger on their cheeks. Quite the reverse; the release of exultant killers has continued unstemmed.
Mitchell Principles
Undiscriminating inclusiveness is political idiocy. It feeds the expectancy of the delinquent, the deranged. Sinn Fein has been allowed to believe that an all-inclusive settlement must inevitably include it, though it refuses to uncouple itself from the IRA. The unionist community will not stomach Sinn Fein in the Northern Executive until it has conformed with the Mitchell Principles in spirit, word and deed, renounced violence for all time and dissevered itself utterly from the IRA. Casuistry might satisfy Sinn Fein's undemanding definitions of the Mitchell principles. It will not satisfy the unionists; and it certainly should not satisfy us.