Post by earl on Jul 4, 2008 14:43:26 GMT
Within living memory Martin McGuinness would have regarded Peter Sheridan as a "legitimate target", that is someone the IRA would have been justified in shooting.
Sheridan was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and, worst off all in the eyes of the Provisional republican movement, a Catholic member of the pro-British police force. During the Troubles McGuinness was a senior IRA member - at one time even reported to be the organisation's chief-of-staff.
Today McGuinness is deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland executive; Sheridan is the Assistant Chief Constable of the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland and head of its crime branch, a new name for the old special branch, which specialised in anti-terrorist operations.
It is yet another example of the astonishing changes in Northern Ireland that this week McGuinness and Sheridan have become allies in a new struggle - the one against the dissident republicans opposed to the present political compromise.
On Sunday McGuinness used a traditional republican platform, a cemetery, to denounce those organisations that are violently opposed to the peace process. In a ceremony to remember fallen 'volunteers' of the Provisional IRA's Derry brigade the Sinn Féin MP called on all the dissident organisations - the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army - to disband. He argued that they had no mandate or support in the community, that the only way forward was through politics alone.
McGuinness was responding to an upsurge in communal anger in his native city to last week's murder of 22-year-old pizza deliveryman Emmett Shiels in Derry. Security and republican sources in the city have told the Guardian that teenage members of the INLA were involved in the fatal shooting although the circumstances surrounding the murder remain unclear.
Five days after McGuinness' speech Sheridan issued a confident prediction that his force was in a position to defeat the dissident terror groups. Sheridan said there was a "wind of change" even within working-class republican areas regarding support for the police. Speaking to Northern Ireland's policing board on Thursday, the police officer who was once prime target of the Provisionals now puts down the weakness of the dissidents in part to Sinn Féin's newfound support for the police. Alluding to the old Maoist dictum that the people are the water a revolutionary fish needs in order to swim, Sheridan drew his confidence from the fact that Sinn Féin leaders, including McGuinness, could turn out a rally held in protest over Emmett Shiels's death and call, quite openly, for everyone in the community to cooperate with the police.
For cooperate in Northern Ireland-speak read inform, the latter being one of the dirtiest words in republican parlance in the Troubles. The idea, therefore, that the very people who justified the abduction, torture and murder of informers even just over a decade ago should now be urging their community to inform on other republicans is a measure of how far politics has changed in the north of Ireland.
On the surface it would appear then that the dissidents are entirely doomed, crushed between the twin forces of a supposedly effective community-backed police service and those political leaders with popular support in the hardest edge areas of Northern Ireland such as Derry's Creggan and Bogside.
Yet the singular shield the dissidents have on their side, even if their campaign is entirely nihilistic, is sheer cold-hearted logic. They can counter, with a certain justification, that what they are doing is only carrying out the "unfinished business" of what the Provisionals left incomplete. They can argue that the union has not been broken; Stormont has been shored up instead of smashed, and British troops are still garrisoned, if somewhat far less visibly, inside what the Provisionals always insisted was an illegitimate state.
It is worth remembering too, as the dissidents will no doubt point out, that when the Provos launched their war in 1969, they did so not principally out of popular feeling but rather as part of a semi-religious project. As the 1916 Proclamation clearly states in its opening line: "Irishmen and women, in the name of God and all the dead generations ... "
From the blood sacrifice of the Easter rising (initiated at least at the time without popular backing - that came later) to the 1969 uprising in the north, republicans were following an historic imperative rather than an electoral one.
Back in the 1960s, when the flame of violent republicanism appeared to be flickering out, it was kept alive in places such as Belfast through a network of families that regarded themselves as a vanguard or brotherhood tasked with a sacred, historic mission. Circumstances shifted in their favour in 1969 in the sectarian conflagration that was to hand over to this cadre thousands of new, young, angry recruits hell bent on revenge against unionists and the state.
Circumstances today of course do not favour the current generation of republican diehards. Yet given the endurance of their ideology, no matter how out of tune it may be to the 21st century, it would tempting fate to predict confidently that the new dissidents will be comprehensively defeated or that they will heed Martin McGuinness' advice to liquidate themselves.
Sheridan was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and, worst off all in the eyes of the Provisional republican movement, a Catholic member of the pro-British police force. During the Troubles McGuinness was a senior IRA member - at one time even reported to be the organisation's chief-of-staff.
Today McGuinness is deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland executive; Sheridan is the Assistant Chief Constable of the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland and head of its crime branch, a new name for the old special branch, which specialised in anti-terrorist operations.
It is yet another example of the astonishing changes in Northern Ireland that this week McGuinness and Sheridan have become allies in a new struggle - the one against the dissident republicans opposed to the present political compromise.
On Sunday McGuinness used a traditional republican platform, a cemetery, to denounce those organisations that are violently opposed to the peace process. In a ceremony to remember fallen 'volunteers' of the Provisional IRA's Derry brigade the Sinn Féin MP called on all the dissident organisations - the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army - to disband. He argued that they had no mandate or support in the community, that the only way forward was through politics alone.
McGuinness was responding to an upsurge in communal anger in his native city to last week's murder of 22-year-old pizza deliveryman Emmett Shiels in Derry. Security and republican sources in the city have told the Guardian that teenage members of the INLA were involved in the fatal shooting although the circumstances surrounding the murder remain unclear.
Five days after McGuinness' speech Sheridan issued a confident prediction that his force was in a position to defeat the dissident terror groups. Sheridan said there was a "wind of change" even within working-class republican areas regarding support for the police. Speaking to Northern Ireland's policing board on Thursday, the police officer who was once prime target of the Provisionals now puts down the weakness of the dissidents in part to Sinn Féin's newfound support for the police. Alluding to the old Maoist dictum that the people are the water a revolutionary fish needs in order to swim, Sheridan drew his confidence from the fact that Sinn Féin leaders, including McGuinness, could turn out a rally held in protest over Emmett Shiels's death and call, quite openly, for everyone in the community to cooperate with the police.
For cooperate in Northern Ireland-speak read inform, the latter being one of the dirtiest words in republican parlance in the Troubles. The idea, therefore, that the very people who justified the abduction, torture and murder of informers even just over a decade ago should now be urging their community to inform on other republicans is a measure of how far politics has changed in the north of Ireland.
On the surface it would appear then that the dissidents are entirely doomed, crushed between the twin forces of a supposedly effective community-backed police service and those political leaders with popular support in the hardest edge areas of Northern Ireland such as Derry's Creggan and Bogside.
Yet the singular shield the dissidents have on their side, even if their campaign is entirely nihilistic, is sheer cold-hearted logic. They can counter, with a certain justification, that what they are doing is only carrying out the "unfinished business" of what the Provisionals left incomplete. They can argue that the union has not been broken; Stormont has been shored up instead of smashed, and British troops are still garrisoned, if somewhat far less visibly, inside what the Provisionals always insisted was an illegitimate state.
It is worth remembering too, as the dissidents will no doubt point out, that when the Provos launched their war in 1969, they did so not principally out of popular feeling but rather as part of a semi-religious project. As the 1916 Proclamation clearly states in its opening line: "Irishmen and women, in the name of God and all the dead generations ... "
From the blood sacrifice of the Easter rising (initiated at least at the time without popular backing - that came later) to the 1969 uprising in the north, republicans were following an historic imperative rather than an electoral one.
Back in the 1960s, when the flame of violent republicanism appeared to be flickering out, it was kept alive in places such as Belfast through a network of families that regarded themselves as a vanguard or brotherhood tasked with a sacred, historic mission. Circumstances shifted in their favour in 1969 in the sectarian conflagration that was to hand over to this cadre thousands of new, young, angry recruits hell bent on revenge against unionists and the state.
Circumstances today of course do not favour the current generation of republican diehards. Yet given the endurance of their ideology, no matter how out of tune it may be to the 21st century, it would tempting fate to predict confidently that the new dissidents will be comprehensively defeated or that they will heed Martin McGuinness' advice to liquidate themselves.