Sir, - Violence begins where truth is obscured or suppressed. Underlying all the factors which are endangering the completion of the Northern Ireland peace process and the formation of the Assembly Executive - such as religious fundamentalism (on both sides) and pragmatism, including pseudo-ecumenical posturings - is the obscuring by Sinn Fein of the fact that decommissioning had been tried and failed.
Up to August 1969 the whole of the Republican movement was committed to the Civil Rights Movement. That, of course, was before the split into Officials and Provisionals of December 1969/January 1970. The bulk of IRA arms had been disposed of to prevent maverick elements reacting to the provocation being fomented by unionist thugs and especially by the Paisleyites.
On the night of Thursday, August 14th this provocation reached its climax, in a pogrom started by the latter element, supported by squads of RUC and B Specials (forerunners of the UDR) with the burning of homes of Catholics beginning with the Falls Road area of Belfast. Burning, looting and pillaging started at 10.30 p.m. that evening and continued throughout the Catholic areas until the arrival of British troops at 7.30 p.m. on the following day, Friday 15th.
If the IRA was in a position to retaliate then the fat would have been in the fire and British intervention would have been demonstrated as an attempt to keep two mad Irish sectarian factions from annihilating one another. However, what was to become the Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein accused the leadership, inter-alia, of leaving the Nationalist areas undefended. They were supported in this by elements of the Fianna Fail government at the time, who had viewed with equal suspicion the Civil Rights Movement as a Communist plot. The result is that the former Provisionals, who now constitute the historic Sinn Fein/IRA, from the moral collapse of the Officials in 1982, although now holding the high ground of Republicanism, find themselves walking on a pragmatic tight-rope, unable to state their case. This would involve admitting that the Civil Rights option was the continuation of the tradition of the United Irishmen and in the context of their present dilemma that decommissioning had been tried and failed.
As I have written over and over again, and will continue to do so until my last breath fails me, the underlying confusion of all concerned, whether of churchmen, notably Father Denis Faul, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein or the IRA, stems from an adherence to a falsified perspective on the Battle of the Boyne, 1798, and the recreant roles of such personages in Irish history as Daniel O'Connell.
It is not a question of revisionism but of simply telling the truth. The Minister of Education, Micheal Martin has a major job on his hands, but an honourable one, if he is prepared to meet the challenge. - Yours, etc.,
Derry Kelleher,
Hillside Road,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.