February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But Murphy found himself having to make a rapid descent from political Olympus in order to address the decidedly street-level issue of a bank robbery, albeit a whopping one.
Murphy had left Belfast for Boston and New York with some stinging press criticism ringing in his ears, so the U.S. visit promised to be a bit of an escape.
One newspaper columnist had lamented the state of the peace process in terms of its unerring ability to generate “inane” and “toe-curling” end-of-year messages from political leaders. These would include the “embarrassing, patronizing one” from the Northern Ireland Office, “allegedly the thoughts of our proconsul, who may or may not be in the North this week,” wrote Brian Feeney in the Irish News.
“The recurring theme in the message will be how far we’ve come and how much better things are now compared to the bad old days,” Feeney wrote. “It’s not good enough. They’ve all been pouring out this sort of bilge for years now.”
Such digs were now, for a couple of welcome days at least, 3,000 miles to Murphy’s east.
During his stopovers in Boston and New York, Murphy would be able to choose his ground in meetings with Irish-American community leaders, politicians and opinion writers.
Hugh Orde put a stop to that.
The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland held a press conference Friday morning during which he accused the Provisional IRA of carrying out the recent robbery of the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast, a raid that netted a now revised total close to $50 million.
Murphy was at the British Consulate in Manhattan when Orde’s accusation hit the Friday newswires.
Aides spent the morning trying to put a semblance of order on a flow of interview requests as news organizations on the other side of the ocean reached out for Feeney’s absentee proconsul.
Sitting in a corner office of the consulate office on Third Avenue in Manhattan, Murphy stared out the window into a part of midtown where much of the world’s banking business is concentrated.
Orde’s allegation that the IRA was behind the Northern Bank heist had upset the choreographed plans for the day. Instead of a few briefings and a leisurely lunch with a group of influential Irish Americans, Murphy was having to deal with what he referred to as “quite a difficult situation.”
Difficult, yes. But being a British cabinet minister, Murphy had little trouble in kicking into a new gear and letting fly at the Provos.
“There has to be trust and confidence between the parties to restore anything and we nearly got it before Christmas, which is the tragedy of all this,” Murphy said.
The robbery, and PSNI’s belief that the Provisional IRA was the mastermind behind it, was clearly a setback. It would now be a Herculean task to get the North political parties back together again. The long term answer, said Murphy, was an end to criminality.
“People in Northern Ireland, when they voted for the Good Friday agreement, voted for an end to paramilitary activity as well as all the other things,” he said. “No one thought that was going to suddenly change on Holy Saturday. It doesn’t work like that. But seven years on, a bank robbery the like the world has never seen, plus a very brutal and savage kidnapping which accompanied it, just have no place in a modern Northern Ireland.”
Murphy said that the impact of Orde’s attribution, which, he said, he “entirely” believed, would be damaging.
There was, he said, no hidden agenda or conspiracy behind the accusation “because the last thing I would want to do is come to New York and Boston and have to deal with what we are talking about. I would much prefer to come and talk about how close we got before Christmas, which is exactly what I was talking about the last two days until this emerged.”
Asked how the robbery ranked on a setback scale of one to 10, Murphy immediately said eight. The last time he remembered reaching so high was in late 1997 and early ’98, the immediate period before the April ’98 signing of the Good Friday agreement.
“We had a murder a night, mainly the murder of Catholics by loyalist paramilitaries,” he said.
But the Northern Bank robbery was, in Murphy’s view, the most serious incident since the agreement because of its enormous scale.
“I can’t think of anything because of the nature of the robbery, it’s so big,” he said. “There’s nothing political about it. You rob a bank, you rob a bank. It’s unacceptable.”
Based on his acceptance of the accusation against the IRA, Murphy said he did not have a view on whether Sinn F