Many people in Ireland today are too young to remember the murders of Christopher Ewart-Biggs and Judith Cooke. As Sinn FΘin, repenting of not a single deed in a campaign which turned this island into an open-air museum of obsolete murderousness, steadily gathers electoral ground, it is probably pointless to remind ourselves what has brought us to this dismal historical pass. Probably: but not certainly. So let us try again.
There was a vital milestone on this sordid path to, heads I kill and am rewarded, tails I don't kill and am rewarded, and it was marked by the wicked murder of Christopher Ewart-Biggs and Judith Cooke 25 years ago last Saturday.
Here was an offence, vile in its conception, yet ruthlessly efficient in its execution, which gave democrats in Ireland the moral authority and the political opportunity to close ranks against the IRA. But those democrats did not do so, for fear of two constituencies - one, the soft-coated, hard-hearted republican one which cherished a sneaking regard for any Brit-bashing murderousness, and two, the woolly-minded, soft-coated soft-hearted liberal lefty, for whom abstract notions of liberty are more important than crushing fascist terrorist movements.
I can speak of this latter group with some authority, because I was a full paid-up member of the liberal left at the time, and would have vehemently opposed any serious crackdown by the authorities against the IRA and its various support groups. But that definition of liberty dealt solely either in terms of abstract notions of justice, or of possible victims of state judicial injustice.
It was a one-sided contract. We traded our notions of liberty for other peoples' lives. Had the victims of such moral turpitude been Jews or Africans or American blacks, we would have abandoned our moral high ground immediately the first barrister used a fine point in law in order to free an obvious killer from the Broederbond or the Ku Klux Klan. But largely the victims belonged a new moral untermenschen: British soldiers, policemen, UDR men, and Border Protestants, people the liberal left in Ireland - and indeed in Britain - barely acknowledged as human beings, with a right to life equal in every regard to that of blacks, Jews or west Belfast Catholics.
Even in the moral greyness of lib-leftism, we might have accepted the moral choice, if we had known what it was, and how small it actually was. There were in fact just a few serial killers on the Border Dominic McGlinchey, Dessie O'Hare, James Lynagh - sociopaths known to the security forces, who could have been locked up for the duration, with scores of lives saved, and entire Protestant communities protected from assault, dismemberment, decay and finally social death.
But the contribution of the priggish liberal-left constituency - my crowd - to perpetuating the culture of murder didn't even begin to compare with that of governments, which though certainly not approving of the deeds done by the IRA, declined to enact the necessary measures to end them.
The guardian of this moral ambivalence and political cowardice was Fianna Fβil, and the non-implementer of the necessary measures of the time was Fine Gael: as ever and always scared of Fianna Fβil's "authentic" version of Irishness.
In an address as marked by its decent pieties as by its absence of substance, 25 years ago Garrett Fitzgerald said the murders of those two blameless individuals, Judith Cooke and Christopher Ewart-Biggs, far from forcing the two goverments apart, would bring them together. And this was simply untrue.
No security initiative resulted from these murders, and the broader republican community could still sleep safely in their beds, untroubled by the pre-dawn sledge-hammer. The Special Criminal Court continued to release known IRA butchers for decades to come on grounds on such frivolous speciousness that future scholars of its delinquencies will tremble with disbelief; and scores of the new untermenschen were murdered by those it chose to set free.
Far worse was to come. Three years after the Ewart-Biggs and Cooke murders, the IRA blew up a boat of holiday-makers in Sligo, an act of such wickedness that it defies description; the same day, 18 soldiers were butchered at Warrenpoint. Enough was enough; appalled at such vileness, Jack Lynch gave the British permission for brief operational cross-Border overflights during terrorist surveillance.
And that was his downfall. Do those in Fianna Fβil today who assisted in the destruction of Jack Lynch, and who ushered in the Haughey years with all their vileness, look back on pride at this? Far from being united in a desire to crush the IRA after the most disgusting deed in independent Ireland since 1922, the Fianna Fβil rump rallied instead to the sound of ancestral voices issuing from ancient tombs.
Standing at the graveside of Liam Lynch, the IRA chief of staff killed in 1922, SilΘ de Valera attacked Jack Lynch and his Northern policy, specifically because of the air-corridor policy.
The Ewart-Biggs/Cooke murders; the Mounbatten and Warrenpoint murders; the Stronge murders; the Enniskillen murders; the Tom Oliver murder, done with the connivance of a member of the Garda S∅ochβna, and finally Omagh: all these atrocities provided the political context to crush republican terrorism for good and all, yet no such initiative was taken. Instead, the palsy of the querulous was confused with principle, and policy was shaped after consultation with the fenian dead, who not surprisingly, were not averse to other souls joining them.
In this hecatomb, who is truly innocent?