You probably haven't heard of Zaoui Berrezag. He and his wife inhabit a politically desirable obscurity in which they must make sense of what remains of their lives. Not that poor Zaoui can manage much metaphysical speculation, since he left a large part of his brain behind at Canary Wharf four years ago. He left an eye there too. He left all of his memory there, and all his perception of family. He is not quite a vegetable, though it would probably be preferable for his family if he were; as it is, his wife Gemaa must clean him and dress him while he mumbles and drools, a manmade imbecile.
One of the men responsible for reducing the Berrezag family to a servitude around this wreck of an individual is James McArdle, who walked free from the Maze prison last week. How much guilt does he feel at what he helped to do to another human being? Does it worry him that not merely has he wrecked this man's life, but he has turned Gemaa, aged 42, into a widow without widowhood, a woman who is now chained to the needs of this infantilised hulk, perhaps for decades while the authors of their misfortune are the heroes of South Armagh?
Civilian casualties
He will probably feel nothing at all. The magic wand of self-exculpation will be waved. I did not do it. The Irish Republican Army took a measured military response to John Major's intransigence. Unfortunately, there were civilian casualties. It was not our intention that there should be. We regret them profoundly. We took all possible measures to ensure that there would be none. Responsibility for what happened to Mr Berrezag must be laid firmly at the door the Major government and of the Metropolitan Policewho cynically and quite deliberately delayed evacuation of the Canary Wharf area in order to maximise casualties.
And that's it. No matter that people who plant bombs on dark Friday evenings in February as people emerge from their offices are alone responsible for the consequences; no matter that through the decades of violence, such IRA bombs have killed hundreds of civilians; no matter that McArdle knowingly joined an organisation which routinely did such things, and sought refuge in lies; no matter that whatever contrition has been uttered by the IRA for its numerous atrocities has been formulaic and empty. He and his conscience are free, while in a small flat in the Isle of Dogs in London, the Berrezag family attend a human ruin whose brain he helped destroy.
I've known a few IRA men and women in my time. The overwhelming majority of them were personally decent and honest people, who mysteriously believed that the intensity of their conviction entitled them to kill whomever the oracle of the IRA leadership identified as the enemy. The relationship between Army Council and volunteer is almost pre-Christian, absolute and binding. Whatever twinges of conscience survive the inaugural oath are soothed by the balm of guilt-transference. I do not do this: the IRA does.
Dispensation
Thus, men whose personal lives are as blameless as yours or mine can shoot hooded men or women who are sobbing and soiling themselves through the last moments of their lives on this earth; they can plan the dismemberment of human bodies; they can conspire to bring sorrow and ruin to entire families, and then pride themselves on the success of their endeavours; they can prise soul from flesh and flesh from bone according to some apostolic dispensation they have inherited down through the ages, and feel absolutely nothing.
So, clear of conscience and bright of eye, and filled with the weird, pagan theology which they imbibed during their time in Long Kesh, last week they emerged from jail, unrepentant members of an unrepentant cult. They have given no undertakings to refrain from violence, nor have they sought the forgiveness of those whose lives they have permanently maimed and whose sufferings will be extinguished only when life itself is extinguished.
Most people say that the Troubles are at an end. Are they? Or are they being put into a refrigerator, to be rewarmed by another generation upon another, distant day? Certainly, if the culture and murderous habits of armed republicanism continue to be celebrated in song and story, then what we could be seeing is not a conclusion to violence but its mere deferral sine die. For I believe a grave miscalculation has occurred. Desperate to propitiate those who may lay waste to their cities again, the British have outraged ordinary unionist opinion by not showing enough regard for the victims of those they have sought to propitiate. Though that opinion is silent and law-abiding, it cherishes its grudges with stoic patience, biding until the time is right.
Popular opinion
I don't believe that the Executive can survive the first hurdle of popular opinion. I believe that sooner or later anti-Agreement unionists will put pro-Agreement unionists to the electoral sword. Can peace survive the failure of the Executive? That is the coming test which the peace process must pass. I certainly hope it can.
But how many of those who have been released from jail are urging their sons and daughters: No matter what, never again? Do those who partook of violence tell their children of the innocent, drooling wrecks like Zaoui Berrezag they left in their wake? Or do they, as did their forebears, speak of the glories of the armed struggle? So what changes?