IRA must face up to grotesque reality of its campaign

One of the problems with a conflict that goes on as long as the one in Northern Ireland is that people start to believe their own propaganda. This has happened to the IRA and it is one of the deepest sources of the decommissioning problem.

Republicans have an image of their role in the conflict that is utterly at variance with the reality. At the heart of the present dilemma is the IRA's determination to define the last 30 years as a war of liberation. To put their weapons "beyond use" would be to face up to the fact that the use of those weapons has been an unmitigated disaster.

Pretty well everyone can admit that the Troubles in general have been an appalling affliction. With 3,600 gruesome deaths in a place with a million and a half people, this is undeniable. The same ratio of victims to population would have produced 100,000 deaths in the UK and half a million in the US.

Half of those who died were under 30. Over 250 children under 18 met violent deaths. By the standards of Rwanda or the continuing wars in former Yugoslavia, the violence may have been relatively restrained, but by the standards of anywhere else, it has been pretty terrible.

Consensus on this basic fact is reflected in the Belfast Agreement and all that led to it. Disagreement on what explains the horror lies behind the current crisis. For what you think about decommissioning is really a function of what you think about the nature of the conflict. It depends on how you answer an apparently simple question: on whom did the IRA make war?

The IRA's answer seems simple enough: we made war on the British army, the UDR, the RUC, and the loyalists in order to defend the nationalist people against aggression. Those groups are the only people who have to fear our bombs and guns. Our weapons were turned on other people with weapons. Since those other people say they will not be using arms, it is safe to assume that we will not be doing so either. We suffered just as much as anyone else in the Troubles, but you don't hear us demanding that the Brits or the loyalists get rid of arms. So why make such a fuss about decommissioning our weapons?

This answer reflects the IRA's self-image and its preferred version of what has gone on since 1969. There are probably many members of Sinn Fein and the IRA who believe it. To sustain a long and sordid conflict, you have to censor, not just opposing views, but your own knowledge of the truth.

BUT if the war is really over, the IRA ought to be able to look back with some degree of honesty. It might start by buying a copy of a superb new book by Marie-Therese Fay, Mike Morrissey and Marie Smyth of the Cost of the Troubles Study group in Belfast. Called Northern Ireland's Troubles: the Human Cost, it provides the most accurate statistical analysis of the conflict to date. And, incidentally, it provides a timely reminder of what nonsense the IRA's view of its own role in the conflict really is.

Firstly, the IRA has been much more than merely one source of violence among many. It has dominated the killing game. Over the course of the Troubles, the IRA was directly responsible for 1,684 deaths, close to half of all the killings. Not including members of the British army or those killed in Britain or on the continent whose religious affiliations are generally not recorded, it killed 745 Protestants and 381 Catholics. For both communities, in other words, the IRA has been a very significant aggressor.

Secondly, it is not true that the IRA fought a war against other official and unofficial armies. Republican paramilitaries killed 713 innocent civilians, the vast majority of whom were victims of the Provos. The IRA killed 73 children under the age of 18. It killed building workers on their way home, shoppers having a cup of tea, women collecting census forms, young couples having a drink in a pub in Birmingham, people honouring the dead of the two world wars, mothers looking for a tasty bit of cod in the local fish shop.

Thirdly, the IRA itself did not carry the brunt of the suffering. The IRA's war was unusual in that, for all its talk of "blood sacrifice", it took far fewer casualties than it inflicted. Normally in guerrilla campaigns (like the IRA's campaign against the British in the War of Independence, in which it suffered about 700 deaths compared with army and police losses of about 500), the guerrillas suffer most.

The Provos, by contrast, managed to kill at least five people for every death they suffered, causing over 1,600 deaths and suffering 355. For every Bobby Sands and Mairead Farrell, there were 10 forgotten, anonymous people who don't get their names on the gable walls. They didn't volunteer for death, they were volunteered. They didn't sacrifice their lives for the cause. Their lives were sacrificed to the cause. And, of course, many of the republican dead themselves were the victims of internal feuds or of "own goals". The largest number of republican paramilitaries killed in the conflict were murdered, not by the RUC or the British army, or the loyalist terror gangs, but by their own comrades. The INLA and the IRA have been responsible for the deaths of 164 of their own members. The army, RUC, UDR and loyalist paramilitaries killed 161. It is striking, for example, that even in a largely Catholic area like west Belfast, more republican paramilitaries were killed by their own side (42) than by the British army, UDR, RUC and loyalists (41) put together.

Together, these facts have a huge bearing on the whole question of what happens to IRA arms. For they remind us that the IRA's weapons have not been a conventional military threat. They have been used against a very large range of people: the armed forces of the British state and republican militants; loyalist mass murderers and grannies out doing their shopping; Protestants and Catholics; politicians and babies; alleged drug-dealers and members of the Garda Siochana. And, remember, it was the IRA itself, with its elastic and infinitely expandable definition of "legitimate targets" that chose to present itself as a threat to anyone and everyone.

Arms used in that way can't be regarded as the mere tools of a conflict, which can be allowed to rust away when the conflict is over. The IRA's guns and bombs were not tools of conflict, but engines of conflict. And the conflict, as pursued by the IRA, was not a war against well-defined enemies, but a shifting, unstable onslaught that invented targets as it went along.

Getting rid of those weapons represents, not a surrender, but at least a tacit admission that the war was a grotesque mess. But so does a permanent ceasefire. And if the IRA can't concede that much, then it must believe that starting it all up again is an acceptable option. In which case, we really are in big trouble.