February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Months of waiting for the outcome of the IRA’s internal debate on its future are expected to end before long. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, goes on holiday next week fuelling reports that the IRA statement is imminent.
A senior republican source said on Monday that a statement is “more than 50 percent likely this week than not” but that he was not certain yet that it would come before the end of July.
The Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and its chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, were involved in top level meetings at the British prime minister’s office in London on Monday and Adams also met the taoiseach in Dublin Monday night.
There are reports that one complicating factor in the choreography of an IRA statement could be the re-imprisonment of Ardoyne republican, Sean Kelly. If Kelly’s case goes before the Sentence Review Commission, it could pave the way for his release, however.
If unionists respond negatively to the anticipated IRA statement, Sinn Fein will expect both London and Dublin to exert pressure on the DUP and UUP to seriously reconsider their rejection of what would be regarded as an historic moment.
A positive speech given by McGuinness at a summer school in Donegal bolstered reports that the long-awaited statement may be close at hand. While refusing to comment on the IRA debate, McGuinness said he fully supported the Adams appeal. “I sincerely hope that the IRA does respond to it positively,” he said.
“It is clear that a positive response from the IRA would have an immediate and enormous impact on the political situation,” said McGuinness.
The DUP deputy leader, Peter Robinson, however, said the British government must be prepared to “leave Sinn Fein behind”. History, he said, “had shown the IRA failed to do what was required of them.”
He was one of many unionist politicians, from both the DUP and UUP, who said it would take months, if ever, for Sinn Fein to win their support for a new power-sharing executive.
“If the IRA once again promise much but deliver very little, the government must announce a new policy,” said Robinson. “If the IRA’s actions do not live up to expectation, and what they say does not match what they do on the streets, then we must move on without them.”
Unionists are demanding the IRA decommission all their weapons with photographic evidence, end recruitment, training, arms importation, intelligence gathering, targeting and involvement in all paramilitary activity.
That will have to be demonstrated, they say, over a period of months or years and be verified by the Independent Monitoring Commission, a four-man body of former political establishment and security figures, set up by the British government at the behest of the former UUP leader, David Trimble.
Ideally, the DUP — now the largest unionist party — would like unionists to form a voluntary coalition with the SDLP to freeze Sinn Fein out of power. But the SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, says he will never abandon the inclusive principle underpinning the Good Friday agreement.
Robinson claimed the wait for republicans had denied democracy for far too long.
“The people can no longer be forced to endure unaccountable, direct rule ministers taking decisions on policy areas that affect their everyday lives,” he argued. “Local power must be restored to local hands regardless of the intransigence of the IRA.”
McGuinness had told the summer school in Donegal that a positive IRA response “would give much needed new momentum to the peace process; deal with genuine unionist concerns, remove from the leadership of unionism its excuse for non-engagement and it put enormous pressure on the DUP to come on board the peace process for the first time.”
He said the downward spiral of recrimination and blame in the months following the collapse of what could have been an historic deal last year, involving Sinn Fein and the DUP, had threatened to destroy the political progress.
McGuinness said the position adopted by the leader of the DUP, Ian Paisley, gave little cause for optimism. “Refusing to talk to one’s opponents is a failure of politics; a failure of political leadership and creates the conditions in which conflict can occur,” he said.
At some point, however, he predicted the DUP would have to talk to his party. “There is no alternative to sharing power with Irish republicans; there is no alternative to the all-Ireland architecture and the equality agenda.
“In the meantime the two governments must push ahead with the agenda of change set out in the agreement and mandated by the people of Ireland, north and south.”
The SDLP leader Mark Durkan, who was taking part in the same summer school, said if there was to be a shared future in Ireland it would require Sinn Fein and the DUP living up to the agreement.
He said it had provided, for the first time in Irish history, an agreed basis for sharing the island as equals. “Since then, its implementation has been impeded by the twin intransigence of provisional paramilitaries and unionist politicians,” Durkan said.
“Living up to the agreement means the DUP sharing power and working the north south agenda. It means accepting the absolutely equal status of nationalism in the North. Living up to the agreement means the IRA ending all its activity.”
“If the IRA fail to do so clearly, convincingly and completely, then they like the DUP will be standing in the way of the best hope of progress for the people of this island.
DUP chairman Maurice Morrow told the summer school his party was not holding its breath for the IRA statement and that unionists would not accept Sinn Fein in government if politicians in the Republic were not prepared to do the same.
“Our manifesto conditions are clear, but the weight of evidence that people will require to be convinced has increased. Unionists will not be bounced by half measures from the IRA, nor rushed into any decisions before they are absolutely certain that things have changed.”
Morrow said the real test of the IRA statement would not be what it said but what the IRA did after it was issued. He warned against hyping up an IRA statement in advance, claiming that only served to undermine its credibility.