Reader TTS

The recent BBC documentary _The Day Mountbatten Died_ described the awful day in August 1979 when the Provisional Irish Republican Army murdered 22 people, including two children, in two

different attacks. Those attacks were carried out by separate but geographically related IRA “active service units”, one on each side of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

The programme made two points familiar to any of us who lived in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles”. The first is that the murders committed on that day demonstrated the  organisation’s

distinctive military structure. The second is that the Provisionals were always at their most tragically effective in the areas around the Irish border.  Both of these points are relevant

to the current discussion over the backstop provisions of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement. The bottom line is: would the reintroduction of border checks result in a return to armed

conflict? No.  In the course of the programme the Provisionals’ former Director of Intelligence, Kieron Conway, confirmed that both attacks were signed off by the late Martin McGuinness, who

was then the IRA Chief of Staff and later served as Deputy First Minister. McGuinness died in 2016 and has doubtless spent the last three years indulging his characteristic verbal chicanery

in the celestial Final Court of Appeal.  McGuinness, more than anyone, was responsible for the shape of the IRA military structures. We should be grateful to him for organising his version

of Murder Inc in such a way that the UK security services were able to walk in and take it over. By the early 1990s even the IRA’s “Internal Security Unit”, through which all operational

details flowed, had become a wholly-owned subsidiary of HMG.   How do you sustain a long-term military campaign when you are commanding an army of informers? The IRA sued for peace because

it was no longer able to fight a war. That remains the case now — in fact, even more so.  When the war stopped, the terrible game of technological one-upmanship the IRA was playing with the

military also came to a halt. But whereas the Provisionals have grown rusty, the British Army emphatically has not. The IRA forfeited momentum in its development of ever more technically

impressive mechanisms of murder and mayhem.  The only military operation that the tradition of “armed Republicanism” is capable of sustaining _now_ is the ceasefire itself. They are doing

this quite well. Indeed, they have no desire, or ability, to stop. The Army Council of the Provisional IRA (which still exists) has no wish to be turned into a minor card in the poker game

being played out between the UK and the EU Commission. But what about those “dissidents” who argue that the legitimate Irish government is held in trust by the tradition of armed

Republicanism? For them, when the Provisional IRA engaged in the UK and all-Ireland structures set up by the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, it necessarily sold out that armed Republican

tradition. They have a point, in that their position carries the rigidly internal logic common to the delusional mindset. Will their insurgency ever become anything more than embryonic? And

if so, where? And this brings us to the second point of the BBC documentary. It was in the border areas, such as South Armagh, that the IRA remained ruthlessly effective because it was in

these areas that their active service units were least compromised. Republicanism here is in the blood and is cemented by ties of kinship. The IRA dissidents, who are well organised in the

urban parts of the Six Counties, will not grow a presence in the rural “bandit country” because they would be interlopers. Having signed off on the Belfast Agreement, Republicans in this

part of Ireland do not want a return to conflict: their embedded smuggling operations don’t tolerate disruption. All violence on their part is concentrated in the enforcement and protection

of that organised criminality. And if a no-deal Brexit leads to further excise and tariff discrepancies between the North and the Republic, then they are quite happy with that. It’s good for

business. Republicanism in the border areas has, over the last decade or two, taken a financial form, one that doesn’t accommodate the “ideological purity” of the dissidents. The Irish

backstop proposals, as presented, are predicated on a misunderstanding of the nature of Irish Republicanism and of the importance of geography to it. There is no threat to “peace” in the

possibility of a “clean break” Brexit. All parties in the Brexit discussion know that. At best, these provisions were included as mechanisms to ensure continuing membership of the EU’s

structures or, at worst, as an attempt at a punitive dismantling of the integrity of the UK.  The backstop parts of the text of the Withdrawal Agreement do serve a purpose: as a useful

distillation of everything else that is wrong with Mrs May’s deal. If, as the current mood music seems to suggest, the intention is to drop the backstop in order to bring the monster back to

life, then that will confirm what some of us long suspected: that the backstop was always included so that at some point it could be dropped. That it had nothing to do with “peace” in the

first place. That it was only ever a distraction. The two boys who, along with 20 adults, were blown to pieces on that day in 1979 were Nicholas, 14, and Paul,15. To  knowingly raise the

phantom possibility of a return to those days so as to effect a political feint is tawdry, to say the least. Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk and their Remainer enablers ought, frankly, to be

ashamed of themselves.