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GFA review held hostage

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“I hope that the review can continue in its present form, but I just don’t know,” Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, said Tuesday after two days of meetings with the different parties.
Informed sources continue to insist that IRA involvement in the vicious beating of dissident republican Bobby Tohill on Friday, Feb. 20, was not merely the result of a pub brawl, as Sinn Fein has said, but was part of an organized IRA operation that would have led to Tohill’s death had police not intercepted the van in which he was being whisked away.
“The dogs in the street know it was the Provisional IRA,” Hugh Orde, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said at the weekend.
At first, republicans denied any links to the attack. Subsequently, however, the IRA issued a statement saying that it was not authorized. However, this has been treated with skepticism in some quarters.
“Was this done on the spur of the moment? I don’t think so. The nature of the operation, and Tohill’s status, suggest authorization,” a source said. “The debate is about when authority was given.”
Tohill was formerly a prominent member of the INLA, and has since been linked to the Real IRA. He was attacked after ignoring IRA warnings to stay out of West Belfast. The warning was issued as part of a crackdown on the Real IRA following the murder last August of Danny McGurk, who the Real IRA shot dead during an attempted “punishment” beating.
Sources are confident that those involved in the attack, named as Harry Fitzsimmons, Gerard McCrory, Liam Rainey and Thomas Tolan, are core members of the Provisionals’ Ballymurphy unit in West Belfast and that one of them functioned as an occasional driver for Martin McGuinness when he was minister of education in the now-suspended Northern Ireland government. Others have also served as Sinn Fein election workers in the past, it has been alleged.
A Sinn Fein spokesperson has denied these allegations and has claimed that they sprang from the fact that one of the four worked in “security” in a Belfast pub called McGuinness’.
The four were arrested wearing white boiler suits, balaclavas and plastic gloves. They were armed with U.S. police batons and pepper spray after eyewitnesses reported the attack on Tohill to the police. The interception, police say, was not the result of an intelligence operation.
Cynics are calling it “Operation Good Samaritan” since republicans have asserted that the four were taking Tohill, who was by then unconscious, to the hospital when the police arrived on the scene. His head wounds required over 90 stitches.
The incident has shaken the talks held under the auspices of the Good Friday agreement review. It occurred two days before talks were to go forward. It has led to a barrage of criticism of Sinn Fein, and outraged reaction from moderate and anti-agreement unionists, as well as hard-hitting statements on Sinn Fein’s links to the IRA from the Dublin government, including the taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
In response to Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams’s denials that he is in the IRA, or ever was, Ahern said last week that he had always “assumed” Adams was a member of the illegal organization.
The incident has led to the Ulster Unionist Party and the Rev. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party to demand that the British government punish Sinn Fein. However, Murphy, the secretary of state, pointed out that “there is no formal mechanism to impose sanctions.” He said that the government has asked the International Monitoring Commission, set up to look into alleged cease-fire violations, to investigate the circumstances of the kidnap. But its report will not be issued until May, by which time the review would have been finished. The UUP leader wants the IMC to investigate the kidnapping separately, but Murphy said the government is reluctant to concentrate on an “isolated incident. It shouldn’t take away from the other incidents” that the IMC is looking at.
Even Sinn Fein’s nationalist partners, the Social Democratic and Labor Party, usually reluctant to attack the party, have condemned the kidnapping. SDLP leader Mark Durkan said it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
It is south of the border that the backlash has been felt most strongly, just where Sinn Fein is hoping to expand its appeal and win a seat in the election for the European parliament scheduled for June. For years, the Southern parties have generally been muted in their response to allegations of republican misdemeanors. But now the truce with Sinn Fein has ended.
Sources close to the Irish government say that Ahern’s and other government members’ comments reflect a growing frustration in Dublin over the IRA’s refusal to end all its paramilitary activities, something that Adams had said clearly last October that it was committed to doing. One suggestion that has emerged to explain the Irish government’s impatience is that Dublin has come to the conclusion that Adams and the republican leadership are deliberately keeping the IRA in existence, knowing it is a crucial bargaining counter for Sinn Fein.
“Paramilitarism is undermining the whole political process,” a source described as a “senior Irish insider” told the Irish times on Monday. “It has the potential to destroy the whole political project if it is not addressed. It is poisoning whatever trust still exists between the parties.”
The withdrawal of Trimble on Tuesday has severely weakened the review. It means that the participants consist at the moment of the DUP, which is there to renegotiate the agreement and is determined not to talk to Sinn Fein, Sinn Fein, the SDLP, now a declining influence in the nationalist community, and the Alliance Party, which is already unhappy and halfway out the door.
Meanwhile, PSNI’s chief constable remains concerned about the implications of continuing IRA and other paramilitary activity. “All this suggests something worrying,” Orde said. “It does not bode well for policing.”
Anthony McIntyre, a former republican turned academic who has been critical of the republican leadership, summed it up differently. “It just shows you that there are people who the peace process does not protect,” he said from his home in Ballymurphy.
However, Murphy remains stubbornly optimistic.
“Everybody wants to see the back of paramilitarism,” he asserted Tuesday. “There’ll be no trust and confidence until it stops.”

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