Analysis: The new criminalisation agenda

Posted by Jim on November 3, 2013

Sean Bresnahan warns that an attempt is being made to rewrite history,
with some victims of the conflict being targeted and discriminated
against, even in death.

What are we to make of the furore in Unionism surrounding the unveiling
of a plaque to Thomas Begley at the weekend in Ardoyne and what can it
tell us about the troublesome question that seems to have paralysed the
political process in the six-counties – what or who is a victim? Placed
against the backdrop of ‘Castlederg’ among other things, such as the
need to designate as living in Northern Ireland in order to get on the
electoral register, we can determine that much of this is the
outworkings of a cultural war designed to revise history and in doing so
legitimise the continuing, ongoing British partition and occupation of
Ireland.

For this to succeed then republicanism has to be labelled as the bad
guy, singularly intent on all manner of death and destruction, while the
state was merely an upholding agent of the law. The causes of conflict
that led to nearly 30 years of violent insurrection against that state
and its laws do not come into it and are to be minimised to the greatest
extent possible.

The IRA are to blame and this is to be the defining narrative, there can
be no equivocation between the Provo war and its resulting casualties
and that of the state and those who died or received injury at the hands
of the state. Thus commemorating dead IRA Volunteers is beyond what’s
socially acceptable while paying homage to the mass-murdering British
Army each November at the Cenotaph is something to be lauded and held in
an elevated esteem and as a source of pride. Those wretched Catholics
are still to be shown their place it seems in the supposedly all-new
‘bright and shiny Northern Ireland’.

Watching the Nolan show on Wednesday night past I have to admit to
feeling the calculated and sweeping bias that continues to infect
everything about this place in the way the programme was set up. It
wasn’t difficult to sense that the governing rationale behind this
so-called ‘debate’ on victimhood is to ensure the criminalisation of the
IRA and everything it stood and fought for. For the likes of not only
Nigel Dodds and many within his constituency but the British government
itself it seems the only true victims were those killed by the dastardly
Provisionals; everything else, from Ballymurphy to Bloody Sunday to
Malachy Boyle’s and Loughinisland, is secondary in the dubious context
that the IRA killed the most people during the conflict; as if that
somehow absolves the actions of the state and its paramilitary
off-shoots.

 

I don’t seek to detract here from the awful pain no doubt felt by those
who suffered as a result of the Shankill bombing, on which the programme
focused, but my wife and I wondered where were the survivors of Kennedy
Way, where was the in-depth coverage of these horrendous killings? The
short synopsis dedicated to the violence inflicted on the totally
innocent people of the sleepy Derry village of Greysteel, an attack some
hold to have involved the participation of a Special Branch informer,
smacked of an afterthought to avoid accusations of political bias. The
whole unseemly episode strikes me as indicative of a predetermined
agenda to separate the violence of Irish republicans from that of the
state and its agents through the construction of a hierarchy of victims.

Perhaps even more worrying is that Sinn Fein now appears to have at
least partially bought into this logic.

The decision to light up Belfast City Hall in the colour of the red
Poppy, the traditional emblem to remember not just those in Britain’s
armed forces who died in war but also those who served in those wars,
including those who participated in the most recent Irish troubles (such
as the SAS killers of Peter Cleary, Seamus McElwaine, Tony McBride,
Willy Price and many, many others), is surely yet another example of the
Sinn Fein leadership bending the knee and hoping for a few crumbs from
the master’s table. It seems they are required or obliged to continually
demonstrate their suitability for government, in the process further
legitimising British actions in Ireland and, importantly in terms of
attempts to create a hierarchy of victims and thus a monopoloy on the
legitimacy of the use of force, without a corresponding quid pro quo for
the actions of Irish republicans – sackcloth and ashes spring to mind.

John O’Dowd’s recent admission on the BBC that future republican
commemorations would have to be “looked at” in the context of the uproar
about Castlederg feeds further into this line of thought, a result no
doubt of the Tyrone Volunteers’ Day parade in that town provoking the
ire of Unionism. Indeed it was stated as one of the reasons for its
reneging on the redevelopment of the Long Kesh prison complex.

The reality is that both the British state and political Unionism are
intent on exploiting the dependence of Sinn Fein’s current strategy on
its need to be in government and its need to demonstrate continuing
electoral strength and relevance. They are under no political pressure
to provide any equivalence between the IRA’s campaign and that of the
British military and its paramilitary extensions and feel more than
comfortable in pushing the boundaries further and further, secure in the
knowledge that for Sinn Fein to attempt any sort of a walk-out at this
stage of the game spells lights out.

Because both the Brits and the Unionists are acutely aware that Sinn
Fein has lost the confidence of the republican community and now depend
on the middle classes to maintain their political position. Any return
to the radical street politics of old is simply a non-starter, despite
the ‘looking over the shoulder’ we now see in an attempt to claw back
the ground ceded to an emerging breed of republicans unwilling to
participate any further in this normalisation process. The bluff has
been called. It’s expected of Sinn Fein to cede the right of the British
side to honour its dead, indeed expectations are that not only should
this be tolerated but indeed actively facilitated. Meanwhile those on
our side are increasingly referred to as terrorists and criminals in a
type of language not heard in many years, though of course it has always
been there beneath the surface. It’s just that now they feel safe to
openly declare things so without jeopardising the continued
participation of republicans in the British political arrangements here.

But not everyone is prepared to sit back and allow this
counter-revolutionary narrative to embed itself to the point where it is
beyond challenge.

Hard as it may be for those directly affected to acknowledge, and
understandably so, neither Thomas Begley, Sean Kelly or indeed the
Provisional IRA itself intended the devastating, horrifying consequences
of the Shankill bombing. There will be those that argue there is no
excuse and can be no excuse but whether we like it or not we simply
can’t divorce this sad event in our history from the context in which it
took place – a 25 year terrorist war inflicted on the Irish people by
the British state in which men and women had little option but to defend
their communities from foreign aggression and attack.

Yes to an extent by the end of this terrible period in our history much
of the violence may have degenerated into a series of horrifying
incidents one after the other but that was certainly not the fault of
the IRA alone as they would have us believe. Indeed when it comes to
determining who was at fault for this the Provisionals are at the lower
end of the spectrum, ultimate blame lies with those who created and
sustained the conditions in which such barbarism flourished – the
British state and its occupation of the North. Had these conditions not
been there in the first place young men like Thomas Begley would not
have felt the need to join a paramilitary army and to undertake the
actions that they did.
This is the narrative that needs to be rubbed out as the battle over who
gets to write history is waged relentlessly by those on the British
side, with incidents such as the one in question to be manipulated and
exploited to maximum effect in pursuit of this agenda. The most recent
offering of the Nolan Show is no exception to this process.

At the finish of the thing it seems that both the British and Unionism
are more determined now than ever to use the advantageous strategic
position they have been gifted by the weakness of Sinn Fein and the
inadequacies of its political strategy to attain in times of peace what
they could never have achieved during the war – the criminalisation of
the indigenous resistance to Britain’s Irish policy.

Having secured for the Northern Ireland state a much greater degree of
legitimacy than would likely have been thought possible, by convincing
republicans to accept and normalise with the governing political

institutions and arrangements here, bound as they are within the
framework of the British sovereign claim once opposed by the armed
struggle of the Provisional IRA, all this has been made possible. The
current efforts to elevate victims of IRA actions to a morally superior
plateau than those who died at the hands of the British state and its
proxies are part and parcel of this renewed criminalisation offensive.

For Britain the war is not over and will not be so until republicans,
even if they do so only tacitly, acknowledge their total defeat and
subservience to the enemy. Achieving a disparity in legitimacy between
British state violence, which is to be seen as morally upright, and that
of those who resisted the British occupation, which is to be seen as
morally reprehensible, is the tool through which they hope to achieve
this long sought-after goal, in the process legitimising not only
British state terror but British rule and the British occupation itself.
They will not succeed.