Two
years after he was alleged to have approved the
Northern Bank robbery Sinn Fein president Gerry
Adams met with PSNI chief Hugh Orde, the man who
laid blame for the robbery at the feet of the
organisation of which Adams is a key figure. Sinn
Fein called Orde a securocrat and at that point
it seemed that party endorsement of the PSNI would
not be forthcoming until Orde had moved on.
A
few months later I met the top cop at a function
in Belfast and put it to him that Sinn Fein would
wait until he had departed his post before signing
on the dotted line. Unruffled, he laughed and
nonchalantly quipped that he would serve another
term to frustrate that. It seems doing a second
lap of the NI policing circuit is no longer needed
for Orde to secure his goal of getting the former
republican party to support his force. Even then,
it struck me that Orde had the measure of Sinn
Fein. He would never support Sinn Fein. It would
be made to support him.
Up
until Sinn Fein's firm pulled off the Northern
Bank heist, the party could afford to procrastinate.
Procrastination was in fact an integral part of
the strategy of expansionism which the party was
then pursuing. Times have changed. The cost of
procrastination is no longer worth the diminishing
return. What was once a strategic asset has become
a liability. The beggar was put on a horse and
rode its way to hell where it quickly discovered
that beggars can't be choosers. There is nothing
left in the trough for Sinn Fein to rummage its
snout through. It has hit rock bottom and brought
the republican dimension of the Provisional project
down with it.
When
the Gerry that matters accompanied by the Gerry
that doesn't, as well as two others, there solely
to give weight to the gender balance, sat down
in front of the cameras with Hugh Orde, it exuded
the appearance of an act well rehearsed many times
over. Just how often Hugh Orde has sat across
the table from Gerry Adams prior to yesterday's
'first', we might never know.
There
is no doubt that Orde had a good browse through
the files of Adams well in advance of yesterday's
tete a tete. When interviewing him just over two
years ago in his office at Knock I noticed that
amongst his well stocked book collection was Ed
Moloney's Secret History of The IRA. While a masterly
exposition of the role of Adams within the IRA,
it is hard to believe the book told Orde a lot
about the former chief of staff that he hadn't
already gleaned from his security files. While
Mary Lou McDonald might well believe, if she is
stupid enough, that Adams was never a member of
the IRA, it is a view definitely not shared by
the British Police Service of Northern Ireland.
In facing Adams, perhaps Orde's sense of pending
victory served as the balm with which to desensitise
himself from the contents of the Adams-specific
accumulated intelligence reports of his colleagues
past and present. Whatever the dispute about their
accuracy, these reports would almost certainly
make the charge that the man across the table
was the Harold Shipman of Ireland, a mass killer
responsible for much of the blood that flowed
through the streets of Ireland and Britain for
the best part of three decades.
Sinn
Fein would of course dispute any such thing, arguing
that all such reports were deliberately falsified
over the years to make things awkward for one
of the greatest peace makers of the modern era
by securocrats opposed to peace. But the perspective
of Sinn Fein was hardly intruding on Orde's thoughts
as he sat contemplating the Provisional IRA leader
brought to heel.
The
timing of the meeting is at first glance a touch
curious. Perhaps that was exactly as Sinn Fein
had planned it to be. That's how the party would
like it portrayed; a slick machine dictating the
pace of events to all and sundry. But in recent
weeks a number of its representatives including
Gerry Kelly had been raising the bar to a height
none of the other players were prepared to jump.
This caused pundits to speculate that it would
be impossible for Sinn Fein to pull back in time
to make the concessions necessary to either placate
the DUP, or deny it the moral high ground in the
event of it not being placated.
It
may be that Sinn Fein rushed their fences to meet
Orde in a bid to pre-empt the growing head of
steam being stoked up by republicans deeply unhappy
about where the Sinn Fein leadership has taken
them. The need to prevent the virus of independent
thought spreading throughout the party would be
high priority within a body like Sinn Fein. Too
much thinking in a leadership-led party can prove
fatal for the ideas of the great leader which
reign supreme by going uncontested.
Whatever,
the reason, one thing is for certain. The Sinn
Fein leadership is now on an irreversible course,
the destination of which will demonstrate that
its leaders were not nearly as hostile to political
policing as they claimed to be. Their real gripe
was that they were excluded from the function
of political policing. Now they too can politically
police by jailing republicans for the same things
that they ordered so many young men and women
to do over the past thirty plus years.
