Another week goes by, and the charge sheet on the murder of Robert McCartney remains blank. There have been more than 10 arrests, but still not a single statement from a witness that would enable the Police Service of Northern Ireland to press charges against any of his murderers.
The men who beat and stabbed him to death are well known, but are untouched. The people who saw what they did to McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine stay mute. Either they care nothing for McCartney’s family, care nothing for justice and are happy to live in a society where republicans can murder at will, or they remain in fear of their lives if they talk.
In the Short Strand area of Belfast only one organisation can generate such fear, and yet the IRA claims that it is doing all in its power to bring McCartney’s murderers to justice. Who do you believe? The justice seekers of the IRA, or McCartney’s family, who say that intimidation of witnesses is ever present? For once the emptiness of republican rhetoric is being exposed by simple inaction. Until people feel safe enough to walk into a police station and tell the truth about what happened that night, until they feel safe enough to take the witness stand in a court of law and tell the world what happened to McCartney, we will know that Gerry Adams and his colleagues are simply playing elaborate and cynical games with the McCartney family.
From the moment McCartney was murdered, the republican movement has played politics with his death, first covering it up and then covering up the cover-up. When police started to investigate, stones were thrown at them; when they targeted the homes of republicans, they were accused of bias.
Had it not been for the extraordinary courage of McCartney’s sisters and girlfriend his murder would have passed unnoticed and unsolved and his murderers would have walked into Sinn Fein’s offices with an extra swagger in their step.
Now republicans would have you believe that the 70 witnesses to the murder will not speak to the PSNI because their politics will not let them. In the doublespeak that passes for republican honesty, the IRA says it is “pressing all those involved in the events around the killing” to “come forward”. It does not say to whom and not once in last week’s 840-word statement did the IRA use the word “murder”, but the implication is clear: we have told these people that it is all right to talk, and yet they choose not to.
The IRA is telling us that the people of the Short Strand would rather harbour murderers in their midst than talk to a police service that is endorsed by democratic nationalists and which has been convulsed by the changes imposed upon it by the Patten report. (Presumably if they ever crash their cars, republicans tell their priest and hope that his report will satisfy their insurers.) It is all a charade, and a carefully constructed one. The IRA’s statement, which caused widespread revulsion because it contained the offer to shoot McCartney’s murderers if his family agreed, was, as always, deeply political.
The IRA wanted to foster the impression that it is a disciplined military unit with the power to investigate, solve and punish crimes within its community. It wanted to legitimise its existence, and by even acknowledging it we colluded in that legitimisation. The provisional IRA has never been legitimate. It is a terrorist organisation that runs a criminal empire and its existence is an affront to our democracy.
Legitimising terror, and legitimising the hideous crimes of the past 35 years, is a critical part of the republican movement’s propaganda campaign. The rewriting of history requires that the IRA’s sordid sectarianism is portrayed instead as a noble war of liberation, that the organisation was committed to fighting oppressors and that its members were defenders of their communities.
Writing in The Irish Times yesterday, Tim Pat Coogan, a serial apologist for republican excess, told us that this summer “in Catholic ghetto areas people will sleep easier knowing that there are republican volunteers watching out for loyalist death squads”, and that Sinn Fein will “be needed on the streets of Belfast to help ensure that rioting does not develop into a wider August 1969-type conflagration”.
Will anyone in the Short Strand sleep easier knowing that the murderers of Robert McCartney can strut around their streets with impunity? Will they regard those murderers as defenders of their community, or will they wonder whether they will be next? And in how many other communities across Northern Ireland will people avert their gaze, terrified of catching the eye of the local godfathers for fear of what might happen to them? The successful prosecution of McCartney’s murderers has become central to Northern Ireland’s evolution into a normal society, and that is why the republican leadership is playing such a determined and cynical political game. If witnesses can overcome their fear and can help the police to bring charges, they will start an irrevocable process that will destroy the mythology that Adams is trying to create around the IRA and would, just as critically, bolster the reputation of Northern Ireland’s police force.
The witnesses could demonstrate that their community no longer lives in fear of the gunmen, that common decency has triumphed and that the police force is the only legitimate law-enforcement agency in Northern Ireland.
Adams, for all his words, will not allow that to happen unless he can control it. In peace process land, republican endorsement of the PSNI has become his most valuable negotiating asset. It can only be conceded in exchange for yet more concessions from the British and Irish governments, and cannot be allowed to be handed away by the people of Northern Ireland. Adams must maintain the myth that the PSNI is unacceptable until such time as he decrees otherwise.
Like so much republican propaganda, policing has become a central issue primarily because Adams says it is so, and the two governments have been mesmerised by the prospect of winning his endorsement. The murder of Robert McCartney has threatened to derail his agenda, and his response to the sisters’ campaign for justice has been an exercise in damage limitation which has now become a concerted attempt at control.
Last week’s IRA statement was part of the control process, as was inviting the McCartney sisters to the Sinn Fein party conference last weekend. So far, the sisters have proved more than capable of maintaining their focus, but the pressures on them will continue to escalate. They can, however, only win when Adams decides that they can win. He and his colleagues cannot control the McCartneys, but they are in total control of their destiny.
Adams was clearly unnerved by the way the sisters’ campaign grabbed the public imagination and will be deeply concerned at the damage it has caused to his myth building. They have exposed the reality of the IRA as a self-serving, self-aggrandising group of thugs that terrorises communities where it holds sway and which has until now given Adams and the rest of the Sinn Fein leadership an aura of menace that served their political purpose.
His priority will be to ride the momentum of the McCartneys’ campaign and to try and ensure that it dovetails with his own, revised, timetable. It will not be easy, because serious political negotiations will not resume for months so there is no mechanism through which he can extract the concessions that would allow him to endorse policing and claim justice for the McCartneys as a Sinn Fein triumph, but try he will. And until he is confident that he can play the McCartney murder for maximum political advantage, that charge sheet will remain blank.
It is grotesquely cynical, but that is the way Sinn Fein/IRA operates and it gets away with it because instead of recognising that it has a determined strategy of subverting and corrupting our politics and our democracy to achieve its aims, we treat it as a normal political party. Our loss, their gain.
