Fr Alec Reid's words about the danger of 'more Omaghs' should not be seen as provocative but as a realistic reading of the mood of disaffected republicans, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
'Does he want more Omaghs?" That was the question reverberating around the BBC studio. The speaker was Fr Alec Reid. No prizes for identifying the subject of his remark: the Rev Ian Paisley, the DUP leader, who refers to the Clonard monastery redemptorist as "Mr".
The bad manners the priest could handle. He could even tolerate Paisley's barely veiled implication that the priest and his co-witness to IRA decommissioning, Methodist minister the Rev Harold Good, were either stooges or not to be trusted.
What was grating on the priest after a long hard day of press interviews on Monday and an even longer, harder week of witnessing the dismantling of IRA weapons was the Doc's relentless negativity, his endless capacity to bring misery where there was capacity for hope.
As someone said during the week, nobody was expecting "hallelujahs" from the DUP, just a signal that if, over a reasonable period of time, the IRA truly did deliver, then the DUP would respond in a reasonable manner. Leaving the focus on the Provos seemed to be the sensible, but disregarded, option.
The IRA must bear a big responsibility for that strange sense of deflation that suffused the North this week. Monday was indeed a big moment, but we've been so long getting here that the heart has been knocked out of the enterprise.
Reid, in his umpteenth interview, had heard of Paisley's response to the IRA getting rid of its guns, bombs and bullets. He had heard his talk of cover-up, duplicity and dishonesty and his complaints that there were no pictures, no inventory, no Protestant cleric witness of Paisley's choosing.
Said Reid: "I would say to Mr Paisley and people like him who are forever insisting on this: does he want to have more Omaghs? Does he want to have a new IRA on the streets, which would be more violent, which would have no vision? And that is a part of the reality of this situation. We could be into a civil war here if we are not careful."
Reid has toiled at the republican working-class coal-face of west Belfast since the late 1960s, just as Good has worked from the same period in loyalist areas. They've paid their dues.
Reid is a constitutional nationalist; such is his conviction that violence achieves nothing that he trenchantly believes the 1916 Rising was a disaster. He was an important player throughout the peace process, telling Charlie Haughey in the 1980s that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness wanted a way out of conflict and helping to create the Hume-Adams axis that was the progenitor of the IRA ceasefire of 1994.
He knows the realities and the sensitivities on the ground. The important point he was making was that while the current focus might be on the DUP's negative reaction to this week's developments, it shouldn't be lost on the public that decommissioning is pretty disturbing for republicans too. There is a considerable degree of republican anger and disillusionment out there. Provos are tight, they tend to keep their disputes in the family.
HITHERTO, ACCORDING TO reliable republican sources, the public and the governments got one story from Adams and McGuinness about the "huge seismic" shifts the IRA was making, while the activists were instructed that the leadership was playing it country cute.
This time the message on the ground to the "volunteers" is in tune with what the public is hearing, say official and republican contacts. After all, you can only do final decommissioning once. As Adams said: "There is no encore. That's it. It's finished. Done."
If this is a major con, then the political process is going nowhere, and the ambitions of Sinn Féin (like the constantly moving shark, as one diplomat portrayed the republican movement), particularly in the Republic, need it to be driven forward.
In 1998 the IRA said there would be no decommissioning; on Monday, it said it had completed decommissioning. The transition in those seven years cut a lot of republicans to the quick. Gerry Adams, when asked what IRA members would do now, admitted as much. The IRA still exists as an organisation but what its individual members do next is a personal matter for them, he said.
"I would certainly welcome those who want to come into Sinn Féin, but they'll come into Sinn Féin as members of Sinn Féin, not as IRA members," he told The Irish Times.
Adams appealed for republican unity and discipline, and added: "We believe, and I think it's part of what we have been able to achieve as a leadership, in validating dissent. Republicanism has to be tolerant. So there are obviously people within republicanism who disagree with our position. Some people have fundamental disagreement with the way we are pursuing this strategy, and I think that's okay. That is entirely legitimate.
"We are not leading sheep, we are leading proud activists who have been through an awful lot over the last 30 years or so. If you can call that unity - and I would call it unity, which is the ability to come together to have frank, constructive and comradely discussions, to agree to disagree - then yes, we are united."
The qualifications in those comments indicate that, indeed, many republicans don't like what is happening. There's a lot of anecdotal stuff flying about of republican disenchantment with the July 28th statement that appeared to end the war.
In Strabane in February there was a huge hullabaloo about a militaristic republican parade commemorating three IRA members killed in the town by the SAS in the 1980s. A few weeks ago there was another commemoration, and this time, according to reports, about eight of the original colour party were absent from the event.
From a tough, strongly republican part of Tyrone/Donegal, they were spotted sitting sullenly in two cars as the parade went by. The men later turned up for the laying of wreaths and the observation of a minute's silence. But when senior Donegal Sinn Féiner Pearse Doherty was about to speak, they noisily and ostentatiously left. They were making a point.
Then there are the "ceasefire soldiers". One veteran, with great disgust, told of another republican parade, in which a Sinn Féin politician learned that some young gung-ho would-be rioters had secreted petrol bombs in readiness to attack the police. He explained: "When he remonstrated with them, another Sinn Féiner shot back, 'so what, the RUC (sic) shouldn't be here anyway'. When it really mattered, you would never see this fellow at a republican parade or function, let alone anything more serious, and here he was posing as the militant!"
The same veteran said that over the long decommissioning process, activists were told by the leadership that while Gen John de Chastelain may have thought guns were safely put away, "they were still accessible".
After Monday he believed the war now was truly over and at the least that the vast bulk of the weaponry was gone. He had no regrets, but neither was he elated.
"Look, I accept that the armed struggle and the reason for the armed struggle is over," he said. "But that does not take from the fact that some republicans perceive what happened since July as total capitulation to unionism and some people see it as surrender."
These are potentially incendiary words.
SO FAR, ADAMS and McGuinness have managed the republican constituency brilliantly and appear to have the commitment and energy to continue to lead republicans away from violence. But, as Reid said, people should not become complacent; they should not underestimate what in the republican mindset are traumatic happenings.
Hoping reflective unionists might make some allowance for that position, he elaborated: "When you are dealing with any guerrilla movement you are dealing with a group who have come through a lot of suffering. People might not think that. You might not agree with what they are fighting about, but the fact is that they go through a lot of sacrifice and suffering.
"Now if you are in the leadership of that group and you start thinking about stopping, then you have to be very careful that you won't have a revolt on your hands. And a lot of them will say: 'We did not suffer all that for this; you are betraying us, you are humiliating us.'
"Now this is a fact: if the IRA had agreed to photographs last year, or had agreed to inventories, they would have had a revolt on their hands. You would have had a new IRA on the streets, or you would be in danger of having a new IRA on the streets. And you end up with the last breakaway, which was the Real IRA and it ended up in Omagh.
"Now I would say to people - and I do get angry - they seem to think that the IRA are so evil, so like devils, that there is nothing positive about them. They just want to go on and on wanting to humiliate them, etc, etc. The reality is that if the people responsible for the IRA want to manage the IRA in a way which ensures they go away as they have now gone away, and give up their weapons, then they have to work to certain rules. They cannot do anything that would look to the rank and file as humiliation or surrender, because you will have a revolt, you will have a new IRA and more Omaghs."