Can David Smith of Harmonstown Road, Dublin 5 really exist? asks Kevin Myers
A letter from him in this newspaper on Wednesday answered a reader's anguished question about how anyone could vote for Sinn Féin, considering its record and connections. "I can only reply for myself," David Smith wrote. "I don't care."
He doesn't care? He really and truly doesn't care? He doesn't care about the dozen Protestants - including three married couples - who were burnt alive by Provisional IRA napalm at La Mon? Or the 10 Protestant workmen who were taken off their bus and machine-gunned to death by IRA men? Or the boatload of old people and children who were massacred by Thomas McMahon, now a senior Sinn Féin activist? He doesn't care about the 11 Protestants blown to pieces in the Poppy Day massacre at Enniskillen? Or the nine Protestants who met a similar end in Frizzell's fish shop?
However, the discomfiting truth is that so many journalists, by their general endorsement of the peace process over the past decade, have helped conceal the starker and more terrible realities behind the Provisional agenda (about which David Smith doesn't care).
No political project in my lifetime has received such continuous and unquestioning endorsement from the media as has the peace process. The former editor of this newspaper, Conor Brady, actually declared that the editorial support which he had given the peace process was the aspect of his stewardship of which he felt most proud.
Perhaps such largely uncritical approval in all the media affected the news coverage. Perhaps it was the natural desire of journalists to play a responsible role in the resolution of decades of tragic conflict; or perhaps it was a fear of being seen to be a warmonger. Whatever it was, over the past decade the peace process has been the focus of a steady deterioration of journalistic standards.
Indeed, the process spawned a entirely new breed of congenial, predictive journalism. This imaginative genre consisted of repeatedly making startling forecasts of imminent historic breakthroughs and major disarmament, with permanent peace to follow. Not one of these forecasts was correct. Not one. Yet the credibility and reputations of the journalists who were duped into trumpeting these same falsehoods, far from diminishing, were enhanced. Not merely could terrorists now inhabit a world without negative consequences for their errors - so too could hopelessly mistaken journalists.
Moreover, the central fictions which lay at the heart of the peace process were protected by our ridiculous libel laws. Thus the media coverage of the visit by a party of Provisionals to Downing Street last month. All reports, without exception, declared that these men were Sinn Féin - but that wasn't the reason for their presence. No, they were there because they were all members of the IRA Army Council (which - as it happens - was simultaneously adding the final touches to its plan for the biggest cash robbery in European history).
Their membership of Sinn Féin isn't what makes them important, but their positions in the IRA. This is why Blair made them meet that now poor frazzled creature, Hugh Orde; his consolation prize for enduring this degrading ordeal will probably be the Met.
So the key Provisional participants to the peace process have been described in the media in the form of convenient alter egos, which of course had been largely concocted for that purpose. But ask yourself this. What really makes Martin Ferris important? His being TD for North Kerry? Or his membership of the Army Council of the Provisional IRA? Yet like so many others, he has repeatedly been publicly misidentified by some titular Sinn Féin function, rather than by his substantive terrorist role.
Yet why this pervading fear of libel? For a libel to have weight, it must defame: and what senior members of Provisional Sinn Féin would feel defamed by allegations that they were in the IRA? The IRA is what shapes and defines Sinn Féin. Without its stockpile of guns, Sinn Féin is merely Fianna Fáil with attitude.
When factual compromise becomes part of the journalistic stock in trade, is it surprising that a culture of inexactitude proves contagious? Thus the general misinterpretation of a Provisional press briefing after the Northern Bank robbery, when an unnamed IRA source was then quoted by many newspapers, including this one, as saying: "We are dismissing any suggestion or allegation that we were involved." A dismissal of an allegation is absolutely not a denial, yet it was nonetheless transformed uncompromisingly into one in lead stories everywhere.
Our trade should be about telling the truth unflinchingly, not writing stories to support political programmes. For the past decade, journalists have been protecting the peace process like guard dogs. That peace process is now over, slain by entirely predictable (and in this column, predicted) Provisional duplicity. Peace, Provisionally, has arrived. It is now time for the hounds of the press to go solely after the truth, regardless of consequence to the Provisionals.