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FEATURES ![](article_line1.gif)
Peace comes dropping slow
No baton round has been fired since
September 2002, says Thomas Harding, and Northern Ireland
is enjoying its quietest period since 1968
On holiday in Ireland recently, a few miles
from the border with South Armagh, my girlfriend and I stopped for
a pint in a small town called Ballyconnell.
‘Which way to the pub?’ we asked a local, and he directed us to
Molly Maguire’s on the main street.
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‘The new doctors the NHS have imported
from Spain seem to be settling in very well.’ |
The first thing I saw was a Ministry of Defence sign hanging on the
wall, punctured by six neat bullet holes: ‘Prohibited Entry: Trespassers
will be prosecuted.’ For a moment, the mediaeval halberds next to
the MoD sign made me think that it was a theme pub. Once inside, I
saw the light glinting off bullets proudly placed on a shelf next
to a statue of the Virgin Mary, and realised that it was a real-life
theme pub of the republican variety. A few sips into the Guinness,
I noticed the handwritten poster selling raffle tickets for the ‘Portlaoise
Jail PoWs’ fund’ (only dissident IRA men are in the Republic’s top
security prison) and a black and white photograph of a funeral cortège
for one of the ten hunger strikers who died in 1981.
‘Can I have a look at that rifle on the wall?’ I asked the barman,
Joe, a Dubliner. He handed down a Lee Enfield from the Irish civil
war of 1921, apparently decommissioned but with the bolt action still
working.
‘And the bullets?’ They were live 7.62mm rounds, a spent .50-calibre
cartridge and some .22 bullets thrown in.
As tongues loosened, Joe talked about Gerry Adams and the betrayal
of the republican movement. He also told me that the pub was a live
music venue, ‘especially for rebel songs, you see’.
‘Bobby Sands’s brother Sean comes in here of an evening,’ said Joe,
but by this time I had, for some unknown reason, already handed him
my Daily Telegraph business card embossed with ‘Ireland Correspondent’.
A few minutes later Sean Sands arrived. I stared at my drink, lying
low, recalling his sister Bernadette Sands-McKevitt at the Special
Criminal Court in Dublin, watching while her husband Michael McKevitt,
former leader of the Real IRA, received 20 years for directing terrorism.
Sean started singing patriotic Irish songs merrily through a microphone.
Soon Joe was desperate for other singers. ‘Go wan, ye must have a
song in ye,’ he said to me.
‘But I only know the words to two songs and they are both a bit, um...,’
I said, not looking at Sean Sands.
‘Ahh, get away wid ye,’ said Joe, and handed me the microphone.
Sober enough to realise this was not the time for ‘Jerusalem’, I had
only one other option. For the first and probably the last time, the
inhabitants of Molly Maguire’s pub sat through a tuneless rendition
of ‘I vow to thee, my country’ sung by an English correspondent for
a unionist-leaning newspaper.
As I wobbled through the last few words, there was a plea in my voice:
‘And all her paths are Peace’. For a few seconds there was silence.
I momentarily had an unpleasant vision of Captain Robert Nairac and
his rendition of an Irish ballad in a pub in South Armagh just before
he was kidnapped and murdered by the IRA, allegedly ending up as pig-feed.
But the locals clapped modestly and the drinking continued. No one
booed, shouted, bottled or knee-capped me. Sean Sands smiled benignly.
My night in Molly Maguire’s was the proof of a theory that has been
brewing for a while — proper peace has descended over Northern Ireland.
Last year’s marching season went off without any riots, this year’s
is heading in the same direction, with all the contentious parades,
including Drumcree last Sunday, so far without incident. It has gone
largely unreported, but Ulster finally appears content with compromise,
and it’s going to be almost impossible to return to the bad old days.
On a visit to Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair’s fiefdom in the lower Shankill
two years ago, you would have been confronted by a Union flag from
every lamppost, red white and blue painted on the kerbstones and an
array of intimidating militant murals. Now, nothing. There are barely
any flags and the murals have been painted over. Adair remains in
prison and his murderous gang of C Company of the Ulster Defence Association
are either dead or in exile. Wiser hands are steering loyalism.
At the interface areas, the borders between Roman Catholic and Protestant
homes, no shots are fired, no petrol bombs chucked and barely a stone
thrown. Not many know it, but a senior IRA ‘military’ commander and
a UDA leader will speak to each other on mobile phones if trouble
looms. There has been no baton round fired since September 2002; the
police are now mainly driving in ‘soft-skin’ vehicles rather than
the ubiquitous armoured Land-Rovers (170 of which were shipped to
Iraq). The army chief in Northern Ireland has signed off two battalions
of infantry, and although there still remain more soldiers here (12,500)
than in Iraq (9,000), no soldier has been killed since 1997, no policeman
since 1998.
Even Ian Paisley’s DUP appears to be eyeing up Sinn Fein like sulky
teenagers across the dance floor, waiting to do a deal to resurrect
Stormont. The party still manages to keep the anti-republican pot
boiling with its refusal (‘never, never, never’) to enter talks with
Sinn Fein until the IRA effectively surrenders. At the same time,
there are rumours that secret contacts have been made with republicans
for a deal to be done in the autumn.
As it approaches the second anniversary of two years of direct rule
from Westminster, the province is enjoying its quietest period since
1968. So what has happened to republican terrorists, the old regulars
of Molly Maguire’s? They are by no means a spent force — the security
services know only too well that the Provos still have the contacts
and means to get a container-load of weapons from Eastern Europe —
it’s just that most seem content to slip quietly out of sight, to
nurture the memory of their vile deeds over a pint. Others are now
so tied to Sinn Fein and its idea of a political process that they
are no longer a military threat. ‘A united Ireland,’ a former ardent
republican told me, ‘is not worth the tip of the little finger of
one man.’
And what of the other republican terrorist movements? The brutish
INLA sticks to maiming recalcitrant teenagers and dealing drugs, the
Continuity IRA has suffered many arrests and has little military capability
— which leaves the Real IRA, perpetrators of the Omagh atrocity. They
are desperately clinging to the belief that a united Ireland can be
achieved by a ‘military’ strategy, but their most pressing concern
is to leave jail in a car rather than in a coffin.
Perhaps if the old guard were not in prison, our night in Ballyconnell,
Co. Cavan, might have ended on a different note. As it was, a few
hours later we stood outside, with a parting gift — a republican poster
containing the lyrics of ‘The Fields of Athenry’ — tucked under my
arm.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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