SURELY the most remarkable feature of the death of the late Geno Gallagher is not the manner of his death, which was not really at odds with his life, but the location an employment exchange on the Falls Road in West Belfast, which has seen the biggest single central government expenditure on housing of any single area in the history of the United Kingdom.
Is it not interesting that the most intractably pro republican urban area should be the recipient of the largest per household state expenditure in the UK? That, of course, is the nature of the welfare state where there is most need, most resources are diverted. It is seldom the case, though, that the welfare of the welfare state is so enthusiastically accepted by those who militarily are doing their utmost to bring it to an end.
For the bizarre truth is that virtually the entire command staff of the Belfast IRA is on the dole the British dole, needless to say, paid at levels of generosity which would in a trice bring this State to its knees if we had the colossal good fortune to inherit responsibility for the governance of West Belfast.
This is not dole collected after shuffling through a queue, as I used to do at Werburgh Street. This is money collected, at your convenience, from the cash machines which recognise your post office bank giro machines.
It has been called by one eminent Northern priest "the War of the Giro" and it is probably without precedent in the history of war where the soldiers of both sides are on the same payroll.
Paymasters
More importantly, and every bit as interestingly, if you told one side, the side which is killing the servants of the paymasters and blowing up their capital, that the British were going to cease subsidising their enemies, there would be genuine incredulous indignation, talk of Thatcherite solutions, right wing economics, repression of the working classes, etc., etc., etc.
In fact, not just from the astonished members of ASUs, but also from most of bien pensant Ireland, which would heartily denounce any notion that the British really should not be expected to continue to pay for the lifestyle to which IRA men and women have become accustomed.
What is interesting here is not the practicability of the notion it might, indeed, not be practicable nor even desirable, though that, of course, is a different question but the fact that even to mention it as a thought violates one the most curious central tenets of the welfare state.
That tenet runs No matter what a person does, no matter how many of the state's servants he kills, no matter whether he has butchered a cabinet or laid waste a city, the state's duty nonetheless is to house and feed him and enable him to drink his pints at night and run a car.
Think about that for a while. If you had a rent free tenant in your house and you were feeding him every day and giving him pocket money to go off and buy a few pints, would you continue to show him such munificent hospitality if you got back one day and found your wife or husband dead and the house on fire, but were unable to prove anything against him though he belonged to the National Society of Host killers and House Burners, sworn to kill hosts and burn their homes?
Fingers raised
Even as I type these words, can sense the fingers being raised accusingly reactionary. Yet why should it be reactionary to ask such a question? And how long would this State continue to house and feed and supply weekly pulses of electronic money to individuals who murdered its servants and levelled its cities?
But we live in the bien pensant world where the British state is expected to fork out regardless of the activities of its citizens and to pay equal regard to those citizens regardless of their deeds. It is indeed a bizarre world, one in which, repeatedly over the past week, we have heard the Government condemned for refusing to meet Sinn Fein at the highest level, as if the murder of the innocents of London should go unpunished and unreproached. Keep channels open, we have heard keep contacts going.
By all means. By all means. There are paid officials, like Sean Donlon, who can do that without elected representatives compromising the principles of democracy. By those means might those who launch the peoples of these islands on another quarter century of war be told that they will pay a hefty price for that war.
Because the certainty that the and the endurance of democracies are every bit the match of those of terrorist conspirators over a 25 year war might concentrate their minds on how thoroughly inadvisable a war is.
Sacrifices
Is it not time we sat down and asked difficult questions about ourselves, about how willing we, are to make general sacrifices to ensure that any attempt to engulf us all in war will be rigorously suppressed? Is another quarter of a century of war and death, unmitigated by the kind of measures taken by this State in the 1940s and the 1950s, not too high a price to pay for the retention of habeas corpus?
These are difficult questions. They were asked by virtually nobody in the past 25 years, during which thousands died. Are our tempers so generous as to permit the full rights of habeas corpus to those who so freely kill those they disapprove of soldiers, policemen, civil servants, judges, politicians, passing civilians and families of all the above?
Yes, yes, by all means be nice to Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness when the ceasefire is restored yes, assure them that our Government will do whatever is possible to ensure that those who are passionate about their Irishness are respected in the North, i.e., carrots and giros galore.
But is it unreasonable to promise that if they spurn the carrot and go back to war, the price they and all their organisation will pay will be high indeed? That it will assuredly be loss of liberty for every single known IRA activist in both parts of Ireland for the duration of the war and well beyond, for now we know what your "complete ceasefire" means. And maybe in the North, the brutal British might even cut their dole money.