Legacy of 30 years of thuggery

"My vote was out of recognition for Sinn Féin's efforts in the peace process. Then to my horror I see that they haven't changed at all. How stupid am I? Pictures of Mary-Lou McDonald carrying the coffin of that monster Joe Cahill shocked me to the bone."

The striking thing about Brian Moran's honest letter was that the answer to his question "How stupid am I?" was "Not very". In the Wonderland we have inhabited for the last decade, it has been perfectly possible for intelligent, decent people to make such silly mistakes. People who would normally be sickened by murder, torture and thuggery ended up voting for people who see all these things as legitimate means to a desirable end.

We had entered an Orwellian world where the way to support peace and democracy was to be nice to those who had most blood on their hands. Lies were creative ambiguity. Turning a blind eye to murder was keeping an eye on the bigger picture. Tolerating depravity was the decent thing to do. And the hard thing to admit is that all of this was, to an extent, the right way to behave. For a larger purpose - saving lives and ending conflict - most of us, to a degree, allowed ourselves to lose our moral bearings.

Now that we are returning from our holiday in Wonderland, the consensus seems to be that the peace process is in terrible trouble. Actually, though, the peace process is going very well. It has moved forward, at last, to a point that should have been reached a long time ago. The journey has passed though a boggy swamp of strategic evasions and reached the hard ground of clarity. The mechanical side of the process - the institutional deal-making - may be going nowhere but the more important and fundamental side - the shifting of perceptions - is making real progress.

If you want to understand this subtler momentum, put yourself in the position of a senior IRA figure who sanctioned the Northern Bank robbery and helped to organise the IRA's cover-up of the grotesque murder of Robert McCartney. What you will find in that mind is surely a genuine bafflement. Why all the goddamn fuss? Why now? Why was it no big deal when, for the crime of writing an honest book about his own experiences in the IRA, we slashed and battered Eamon Collins into a bloody pulp in 1999? Back then, Gerry Adams merely announced that he had no reason to believe foul play was involved (implying that Eamon Collins beat and stabbed himself) and the world just passed on by.

Why was it okay when Charlie Bennett had his head blown off at point-blank range with a shotgun a few months later? When the IRA murdered four men it claimed were drug dealers? When it killed the "Real IRA" man Joseph O'Connor, and Gerry Kelly described the killing as tragic but refused to condemn it? When senior Sinn Féin figures turned out for the funeral of Keith Rogers in 2003, after he had been killed in a shoot-out between rival IRA gangs in south Armagh? When Gareth O'Connor was "disappeared" in May 2003? When Bobby Tohill was beaten, kidnapped and dragged off, presumably to be killed, last year? When the mutilation of young people deemed guilty of crimes by a kangaroo court remained standard practice? When bank robberies, smuggling and other kinds of crime helped to keep the political and military show on the road?

Why, the IRA figure might reasonably ask, were all those things allowed to pass with nothing more required of Sinn Féin than a blank denial or an occasional use of the word "wrong", yet now, all of a sudden, murder and bank jobs create all this fuss? It's a good question and the answer lies in the way the peace process, for all its faults, has gradually changed the idea of normality.

Thirty years of mayhem made violence, thuggery and criminality such a familiar part of the political backdrop that they became virtually invisible. It took major atrocities to trigger any co-ordinated sense of revulsion and even then it proved impossible to sustain. The irony for the Provos is that the less overtly appalling they have become, the more outrageous their attachment to gangsterism has come to seem. The more they have succeeded in pushing their way into mainstream politics, the more visible their undemocratic trappings have become. Ten years ago, a photograph of Gerry Adams surrounded by men and women in military uniforms with black berets and dark glasses was hardly worth printing. Now, the photographs of the Sinn Féin president at an IRA commemoration in Strabane last weekend scream out the remarkable fact that a would-be Taoiseach still hangs round with a private army. Slowly but surely, a sense of normality has been regained.