Replacing the Sheep

Britain's process of negotiating for peace in Northern Ireland has bought a measure of stability, but the terrorsim is breaking out again in the form of the Real IRA. This is particularly worrying with the new U.S. Administration showing its determination to ignore the age-old adage "never negotiate with terrorists."

From Melanie Phillips:

Replacing the sheep

Oh dear. Just when the forces of surrender engagement had steamrollered any opposition to talking to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taleban, Syria, Iran and any other enemy of civilisation they could find to make nice with -- all on the basis that the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ proved that through talking to terrorists swords would be beaten into ploughshares and lions lie down with lambs -- Northern Ireland terrorism picked up its automatic weapons and started firing again.

Two British soldiers were killed and four other people injured yesterday when masked gunmen opened fire on a group of soldiers outside the Massereene Barracks in Antrim. Tonight, the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the attack. The attack followed hard on the heels of a warning by Sir Hugh Orde, head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that the threat against his officers and military personnel was at its highest for almost a decade.

Today, the former Northern Ireland Secretary Lord Mandelson dismissed the attack as the work of a splinter group which would have no effect on the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’. But with Irish terrorism, you never could see the wood for the splinters. The Provisional IRA, after all, had itself originally splintered off from the Official IRA because the PIRA thought the Officials had sold out to the British. Now that Sinn Fein/PIRA is in the government of the province, violent Republicanism has splintered again into several different groupuscules of which the Real IRA is but one, all fuming that the Provos sold out to the British.

The fact is that the ‘peace process’ resulted in a Faustian pact. It is undeniable that the situation in Northern Ireland has been transformed for the better and that its children are now being brought up in a world unknown to their parents -- a world without bombs on the streets. And that is a benefit which cannot be gainsaid or ignored, not least by those who have not experienced a life lived under the terrible shadow of such terror.

But it has come at a high cost. Because the dynamic of the ‘peace process’ is that the process itself becomes all consuming as it must be kept going at all costs. So to keep the men of violence on board, no price is too high and any downside is denied.

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