|
The
decision by Mairead Kelly to meet PSNI boss Hugh Orde
in a bid to acquire more information about the death
of her brother Paddy has generated a certain amount
of public discourse. Paddy Kelly died at Loughall
in 1987 while on active service with the Provisional
IRA. He and seven comrades were ambushed by the SAS
and RUC in a carefully constructed ‘killing zone’
and finished off. It was as merciless as it was premeditated.
There
is no doubting the lethal intent of the eight republican
volunteers who set out that May evening. They were
on a mission against an enemy installation and personnel
and knew the risks involved. They were heavily armed
and some did manage to fire the weapons they held
at their British state attackers, presumably with
a view to killing them, before being felled themselves.
Many in the unionist community have subsequently protested
that they got what they deserved and that that should
be the end of the matter. On today’s BBC Talkback,
Jeffrey Donaldson of the DUP articulated such sentiment,
arguing that republicans like myself who feel further
exploration of the issue is purposeful are being inconsistent.
Many of those who later contacted Talkback went further
and accused republicans of downright hypocrisy.
The
main contention of the unionists is that Provisional
IRA volunteers claim to have been involved in a war
and could not therefore expect to have benefited from
the niceties of arrest. Conveniently ignoring the
state interception – when it suited – and
arrest of heavily armed UDA killers en route to kill
unarmed nationalists, Jeffrey Donaldson persists in
the myth that death before detention is the only plausible
option open to British state security personnel monitoring
republican active service units equipped with modern
weaponry.
In
a war it is anticipated that there are rules of engagement.
While the Provisional IRA has violated them incessantly
it was certainly not alone. The British can ill afford
to stand on some moral plateau and wax ethical to
others on these things. Seamus McIlwaine was administered
the coup d’grace by a member of the SAS while
he lay on the ground injured, having been earlier
shot and then interrogated by his captors. At least
one of the Loughall volunteers had covered some distance
on foot before being captured unarmed and then shot
at point blank range.
In
justifying this, the unionists provide an unwitting
justification for the war waged by the Provisional
IRA. If the British were not involved, as their advocates
and apologists over the past thirty five years have
insisted, in prosecuting a war but were merely responding
to an ‘aggregated crime wave’, then war-like
measures have no part to play in that response. State
murder of those involved in ‘crime’ is precisely
that – murder. And if the state murders those
it claims are its own citizens, it hardly encourages
others to desist from responding in kind. Those seeking
an insight into the origins and development of the
Provisional IRA campaign need look no further than
1969 and subsequent state policy. British indifference
created the organisation; British repression sustained
it. Its volunteers did not carry some genetic code
dating back to 1916 predisposing them towards physical
force. How otherwise can it be explained that the
settlement of Good Friday 1998, so readily embraced
and celebrated by those volunteers, does not vaguely
resemble the objectives of Easter Sunday 1916?
Unionists
such as Jeffrey Donaldson wish to place their bets
each way. On the one hand, the IRA was not at war
and was a mere criminal enterprise. On the other,
because it claimed it was at war its volunteers could
therefore be subjected to the merciless rigours of
the battlefield with no means of legal recourse. And
the war measures used to suppress the IRA of course
absolves the British state of any culpability for
human rights violations which it would most certainly
have to answer for in circumstances other than war.
Quintessential unionist cant, both self-serving and
pompous.
The
Loughall massacre certainly throws up a range of challenges.
But unionism is not alone in facing them. One avenue
that will never be fully explored, no matter how many
meetings take place between Mairead Kelly and Hugh
Orde, is the possibility that IRA volunteers were
deliberately targeted at Loughall after the British
Government was made aware by a key element within
the republican leadership that it was willing to parley
and settle for considerably less than those who died
that night were intent on securing; something that
they might have revolted against had they not have
been slain; something which in order to succeed necessitated
their removal. Whether the British killed those volunteers
to facilitate what later became known as the peace
process may by the real story of the Loughall massacre.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
