February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But what are the rest of us to think? Somewhere amid all the finger pointing and invective in recent weeks is a little thing called the truth. Blink and you’ll miss it.
The IMC report was inserted into the fray nine years to the day after headlines blared the explosive end of the IRA’s first ceasefire.
It was Feb. 9, 1996 and what would become known as the Canary Wharf bomb in the London docklands signaled a crashing end to 17 months of relative calm.
Despite the fatalities, injuries and outrage, Gerry Adams spoke in the aftermath of the need to continue with the peace process.
British Prime Minister John Major found it harder to look hopefully to the future. He spoke of “a dark shadow of doubt” where optimism had earlier existed.
But one thing was not in doubt. The bombing had been carried out by the IRA. The Provos admitted to the blast even as they castigated the London Metropolitan Police for not making better use of what they claimed was an adequate advance warning.
It is arguable that, because the issue of who did it was dealt with immediately, the restoration of the ceasefire was ultimately brought forward. The interruption in the search for a permanent peace lasted about a year and a half.
Nine years on, the issue of who carried out the Northern Bank Heist is being argued over and over.
The restoration of a viable peace process, as a result, is somewhere out there in the wide blue yonder. That yonder could be far more distant than 18 months hence.
The ancient Celts, the Greeks and others had theories of historical cycles. Roughly speaking, the Greek version had chaos followed by small village communities, republics, democracies, empires and then chaos again.
Regardless of fault, or who admits or denies what, we seem to have turned a cycle of sorts in nine years, from dark shadows of doubt, to, well, dark shadows of doubt.
In between there were talks, an agreement, elections, a parliament and, as we have now, a political landscape that is at least dangerously uncertain, if not downright chaotic.
There are other kinds of cycles than the grand historical turns described by the philosophers of ancient Athens.
Organizations and groups have their own internal wheels.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Vietnam War, “Fire in the Lake” (a seminal work that emphasized the country over the actual conflict staged across its landscape), author Frances FitzGerald touched on a cycle to which regimes and revolutionary groups alike are constantly prone.
This cycle is created by a seemingly inevitable combination of fear, mistrust and outright hostility that, over time, seeps into the gap between those in command and those who make up the regular ranks.
It is spurred in its early stages by atrophy in the channels of communication between the top and bottom levels of the organization. This leads to corruption and a loss of initiative in the lower echelons, isolation from realty at the top, and, finally, a breaking up of the entire organization.
FitzGerald applied this theory to both the government of South Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, the North backed guerrilla army that fought to overthrow the Saigon regime. It was the latter group that was more effective in keeping this cycle in check. And it won the war.
FitzGerald wrote that what happens when this cycle runs its full course is that individuals revert to type.
If the IRA has people in its ranks who can blow up buildings and shoot people dead in the street, it has people who won’t think twice about robbing a bank.
Ergo, if politicians can pick up the peace process shards after a bombing, they can also pick up the pieces after a heist, even one as outrageous as the Northern Bank caper.
And of course they will.
But first the governments must regain an element of control over the pace of events and the direction of political proceedings in the immediate light of the St. Patrick’s Day season and, in the longer run, the upcoming British general election.
That election is expected in May. The last thing that Tony Blair needs now is for the North to explode in his rear.
Indications of this so-far overriding governmental need for a return to some order, some process, can de deduced by the lack of arrests made in the Northern Bank case and the absence of publicly disseminated evidence beyond finger pointing, uncorroborated accusation and innuendo.
It can be seen in the British government’s decision to take a couple of weeks to mull over the report of the Independent Monitoring Commission, a document that is pretty clear cut and all of 10 pages.
It can be assumed by the fact that Bertie Ahern, though he is exacting his pound of political flesh with some relish, has not gone over the top, has not named names or slapped handcuffs, literally or politically, on Gerry Adams.
Ultimately, what will pull this situation back from the edge is the price. What price, for example, the Good Friday agreement? It will be a question asked by Irish-Americans more than once in the coming weeks, whether or not there is a buns-and-tea gathering in the White House.
Sinn F