IN his Irish Times article of March 14th, and again at the Sinn Fein Ardfheis in Dublin at the weekend, Gerry Adams identified the performance of the Irish Government as a significant contributor to the failure of the peace process and the ending of the IRA ceasefire. I believe that his analysis is correct in substance, but that it lacks the subtlety to provide clues as to what needs to happen next. What is required is more of a challenge to the mind set which determines the Government's approach.
Mr Adams has criticised for the Irish and British Governments for their handling of the peace process. I believe we need to go further and say that there is a sense in which our own Government deserves a greater share of the blame. In truth, the begrudging response of the British government has been all too predictable. The British attitude to the peace process is explicable in terms of historical self interest and the effects of imperialist hangover.
The procrastination and cynicism of the past 18 months should therefore not surprise us. It is not news that the British government does not share the aims of Irish republicans. But when the rhetoric from London is matched almost word for word by the line from Dublin, there is something seriously out of joint.
In retrospect, it is clear that the brief tenure of Albert Reynolds represented an aberration from two decades of anti republicanism . . . in Dublin. With the coming to office of the rainbow coalition, there was a significant shift in the tone. In essence what happened was a reversion to the attitudes which prevailed for many years.
It is important to stress that the Irish Government's reasons for being opposed to Irish republicanism are entirely different from those of the British government. They result from the flipside of imperialist hangover - post colonial neurosis, a condition which afflicts all of our political parties and media, and governs 95 per cent of public thinking on the subject of the Northern conflict.
For example, the vast bulk of editorial comment and analysis in the Republic is not merely profoundly unsympathetic to Irish republicanism but is even more so than in Britain. This situation has about it an aura of normality, but only be cause the all pervasive neurosis prevents us from perceiving its absurdity.
The national neurosis has to do with what paramilitaries call "armed struggle". Although the language used by Irish politicians to condemn political violence is superficially similar to that of their British counterparts, the impulse is quite different. British condemnations of paramilitary violence are simply hypocritical - the imperial pot calling the kettle black. But in Ireland condemnations of violence are an expression of the guilt and shame of a people whose freedom is steeped in blood.
ALL three of the parties which constitute the present coalition government have their roots in armed struggle. The fact that none of them encourages discussion of this reality does nothing to negate it. It will be noticed that obsession with condemning armed struggle appears to occur in inverse proportion to, the time which has elapsed since the abandonment of this strategy by the organisation to which the speaker belongs.
In recent years, the most virulent opposition to paramilitary violence has come from the strand which began in the Official IRA and culminated, just a few short years later, in Democratic Left. A wet week after its own involvement in the struggle, the movement popularly known as the Stickies preached anti violence with a fervour which put the successors of Collins and Connolly in the shade. In the beginning, the Stickie influence was sold as a necessary corrective to prevailing ambivalence. But more arid more, it developed into a philosophy of uncomplicated anti nationalism. It tapped into the residual guilt of a society which had never come to terms with the nature of its creation, reawakening a number of peculiar ghosts.
The interaction of race shame with the IRA," bombing campaign created an outburst of breast beating which drummed its way into every crevice of Irish politics and media, creating a hostility to Irish nationalism matched only on the fanatical edges of unionist opinion. Emerging in the Progressive Democrats, in some sections of Fine Gael, and in most of the leader columns of the national newspapers, this philosophy" displayed little to distinguish itself from unionism. But it, wasn't unionism; it was extreme nationalism in retreat, the ricochet of Irish history in a climate of denial.
With the exception of the Lynch faction, which subsequently became the PDs, Fianna Fail remained relatively immune from Stickiness. This immunity enabled the creation of the peace process and the IRA ceasefire. Albert Reynolds refused to acknowledge any debts to history, and the pragmatism born of this refusal led to the only breakthrough in 25 years.
THE present Government was always going to be a different matter. Added to the Redmondism of John Bruton, we had the Stickiness of Democratic Left. It was on the cards that we would soon revert to the long term pattern of anti nationalism and guilt based appeasement of unionist intransigence.
While unionist naysaying gains succour from Dublin, innocent lives will continue to be lost. That is the bottom line of this conflict, and it is the subtext of what Gerry Adams has written and said. Unionists do not want to move. The British government does not want to move them. Nationalists cannot move on their own.
Movement will become possible only if the British government makes unionists an offer they cannot refuse. Bud this will not happen unless and until the British government ceases to receive affirmation from Dublin for its self serving and cynical gamesmanship.
This is especially relevant in the context of the role of the US administration. If London is sullenly attuned to the mood in Washington, Washington is ever watchful for the signals from, Dublin. With the Stickie world view dominating the agenda here for more than a year, it was inevitable that, Clinton's visit notwithstanding, pressure on London would be minimised.
One of the main obstacles to peace is the neurosis based reluctance of the rainbow coalition. If republicans could see this more clearly, they would see also not only the politically fatal consequences of any resumption of violence, but the vast possibilities which reside in a shift to nonviolence.
A return to armed struggle would harden the anti nationalist neurosis for another generation, consolidating partition and superficially validating the British position. Such things are surely not on the republican agenda. A permanent abandonment of armed struggle, on the other hand, would allow the neurosis to disperse and the dormant spirit of Irish nationalism to re emerge. In these conditions, the moral force on the British government would be unbearable. Republicans could realise their objectives without firing another shot.