Opening the Door

THE CATHOLIC Church will legalise the pill. The IRA will cease firing. The reasons given in both cases will be fascinating, the language used a testimony to diplomacy and delicacy. I can’t imagine how either organisation will phrase their announcements, but the IRA’s position is far less problematic. Unlike the church’s historic stance on contraception, the IRA has always maintained that killing is a tactic, not a principle. It is time now to change tactics. The change will come very soon.

When it does, the ranks of Sinn Féin will be swollen with a mass influx of radical volunteers, North and South. A stunning portent of that was given in Derry at the end of January, when a political bandwagon rolled around the town for three days, culminating in the biggest Bloody Sunday commemoration seen since the hunger strikes of 1980–81. Attendance at independently organised seminars, lectures and debates, but particularly at the public forum held by the Sinn Féin Peace Commission, revealed that this party will become the natural focus of radical politics.

Those who came along to speak their minds – critically – to the Commission were at home and at ease in their skins. They used a political shorthand which took for granted that Sinn Féin understood and accepted the terms and parameters of their contributions, and sketched a vision of post-war Ireland in which, they assumed as a matter of natural course, Sinn Féin would play a leading role.

OPEN, INCLUSIVE DIALOGUE

With one understandable exception, there was little undue criticism of the past IRA campaign, and that criticism more often than not focussed on specific actions, such as Enniskillen, Warrington and the Shankill bomb. The exception came when a member of the Protestant community in Derry told the Commission that the IRA were scum, and even then his calm contribution was couched in conciliatory terms. “The bravest thing that they could do is lay down their arms . . . why can the IRA not have a ceasefire for three months?”

Those who are still reeling from the impact of Gerry Adams’ fifteen minutes of fame in America have missed the more durable, solid gains which Sinn Féin are making North and South at the moment. The party has initiated an open, inclusive dialogue through varied and ingenious fora around Ireland to which people are flocking in droves, their opportunity come at last to participate in a manner not seen since the population was galvanised by the Civil Rights movement of the sixties.

The key to participation was the possibility, then probability, now virtual certainty, that the IRA will be removed from the equation, allied to the simple and brilliant Sinn Féin tactic of throwing open the political door to discussion. No other party has done that, on this island or in Britain, though all parties proclaim that we are at the most important crossroads ever in Anglo-Irish history. Amazingly, it is only Sinn Féin which has invited the public at large to help make and shape that history, and which itself takes every opportunity to make its case at local level.

GARGANTUAN EFFORTS

No representative from the Irish government, not even a back bencher from either of the coalition parties, came to Derry for instance, to take part in the political ferment, though the credentials of those who organised one of the independent meetings were impeccable enough to attract SDLP participation. The SDLP itself has not organised any meetings to discuss an end to war.

Sinn Féin is cleaning up right, left and centre, in literal political terms, in a mass trawl of the country. Anybody who wants can go along and speak their piece. The respect this shows for the electorate is returned in kind, in terms at times so elaborate – “I want to assure you of my genuine best wishes for the endeavours which must be made in the days ahead and to thank Sinn Féin for the gargantuan efforts in which it is already involved”, said a member of Derry Women’s Centre – that some journalists have taken to muttering a background chorus, lest anyone forget Sinn Féin’s support for the IRA, of atrocities that have begun to fade in the memory. “Teebane, Bloody Friday, Bessbrook . . .”

The party’s revolutionary commitment to glasnost is by no means entirely altruistic. On a pragmatic level, participation by the public, especially by community activists, is vital as the IRA prepares for a cease-fire. Just as it could not conduct armed struggle without the tacit acquiesence or active support by the community, it cannot now credibly end the struggle without the public endorsement of that same community.

The wave of support which has come forth for at least a considered look at changing tactics, which has been accompanied by a simultaneous insistence that the Downing Street Declaration must be teased out and amplified – there is widespread dissatisfaction with the British Government’s intention to resurrect Stormont and devolve responsibility for garbage collection to a provincial parliament – strengthens the nerve and prospects of both Sinn Féin and the IRA. The more people nudge them towards a ceasefire, the easier it will be to achieve and the quicker it will come, not least because so many gifted conscientious objectors are standing visibly in the wings, ready to join up and do unarmed battle. The excitement is palpable and infectious.