Almost beyond parody, with the IRA intact, its proceeds from the Northern Bank still in its coffers, its intelligence files enriched by the Castlereagh raid, its arms dumps bulging, and with the destruction of RUC Special Branch complete, the British government now obliges it by disbanding the Royal Irish Regiment, writes Kevin Myers.
Yet contrary to virtually every single breathless analysis on the airwaves, even more abysmally moronic than usual - and that, by God, is saying something - the IRA has offered neither to disband nor disarm. For disposing of some weaponry is not disarming. You cannot be part-virgin, and you cannot be part-armed.
So here it is. The IRA is not going away, and neither is its careful use of language. For example, whenever the IRA wants to say "all", it says "all", as in "all IRA units": whenever it doesn't want to say "all", well, it doesn't, as in the rest of that sentence: "have been ordered to dump arms". So, some arms will be dumped, but not all. And contrary to the implication that "dump" implies waste material about to be disposed of, this is how the OED defines the noun "dump" in the military context: "The site of a store of provisions, ammunition, equipment, etc, deposited for later use" (my italics).
Now, of course, some of these dumps will be disposed of under the beady eye of a Canadian ex-general (who has been enduring the retirement from hell) and a couple of obliging, tail-wagging, ecumenical, peace-process-loving dog-collars, but others will not. Why? Because the Provisional IRA owes its existence to the nationalist calamities of 1969 in Belfast, and the graffiti covering the walls of nationalist ghettoes which subsequently declared: "IRA = I Ran Away". The Provisionals are no more going to disarm totally than become Beefeaters in the Tower of London.
These particular Troubles are over, to be sure, but they could have been ended a decade earlier if the security forces of this Republic had assisted in the closure of the IRA's operational base in South Armagh. Instead, we pursued security policies of a diseased and cowardly querulousness. Thus for 30 years, Slab Murphy's farm-complex straddling the Border was a major terrorist and smuggling base, well known to soldiers and police, from where he openly mocked the rule of law and scorned all notion of civilisation.
In 1986, Murphy even had the unspeakable gall to sue for compensation for damage allegedly done to his house by an IRA bomb which killed two British soldiers. (My, I bet that explosion came as a big surprise to him.) Nearby, and not long afterwards, a soldier and two policeman were killed in a landmine blast. One of the RUC men was Bill Laurence, a young Catholic and former GAA man from Co Down who had chosen the path of law and civilisation above the call of the tribe. He bequeathed all his effects to Mother Teresa.
Some weeks later, five IRA attackers were seen fleeing into Slab Murphy's cross-Border complex. Guided by an army helicopter, some pursuing British soldiers entered the property from its Northern side. They saw two civilians, and a Scots Guardsman, Private Robinson, moved towards them, inadvertently crossing into the Republic. The two men grabbed him and held him, as gardaí arrived. Far from arresting the terrorist suspects, they arrested Private Robinson and hauled him off to Dundalk Garda station, where he was held for six hours. The occupants of the Murphy farm were neither questioned nor arrested.
What an utter triumph for pedantic jurisdictionism at its most diseased! Lives were daily being lost in a brutal terrorist war, yet gardaí were meanwhile expected to be on their knees with tape-measures, trying to determine which was north and which was south of the Border running through the most evil terrorist complex in Europe. So what possible chance was there of ever defeating the IRA in South Armagh, if by moving a single foot, IRA men were immediately protected by the Republic's law, and by moving that same foot, Northern security forces would be arrested and detained by An Garda Síochána? The melancholy truth is that this State lacked the political will to strangle armed republican terrorism in its heartland; instead, it slithered into a policy of abject appeasement, now known as "the peace process".
Eight years ago last Sunday week, James Morgan, a 16-year old Catholic boy, set out to hitch-hike from Newcastle to Castlewellan, Co Down. He was picked up by loyalist terrorists, who, discovering his religion, savagely assaulted him with a hammer. They then took James to a sink-hole, traditionally used to dispose of dead farm animals. Having finally beaten him to death there, they set fire to his corpse, before immersing it amid the rotten cadavers.
One of James Morgan's killers, Norman Coopey, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1999. The following year, he was released under the terms of the utterly squalid Belfast Agreement.
A society is not made by an accord which can allow such filth back into society; nor can peace be constructed from a culture in which killers are acclaimed, as they are today in West and North Belfast, while the kin of victims - such as those of brave, forgotten Bill Laurence or poor Jimmy Morgan - silently and invisibly grieve. So who can say what long-term damage has been done to Ireland's moral health through the failure of this State to enforce its law, and most of all, its order, over republican terrorism? We have steadily been injecting poison into our veins, and in time it will reach our very heart.