Sir, - No one would dispute Dennis Kennedy's central point (The Irish Times, August 19th) that armed terrorism and democratic government are polar opposites. But is it not chillingly symptomatic of contemporary Northern Ireland politics that a commentator as intelligent and articulate as Dr Kennedy should so readily adopt a rhetorical stance in his analysis of the decommissioning impasse? If the language of tribalism is already echoing within the walls of Queen's, the situation may be even worse than we suspect.
In the opening paragraph of his response to Garret FitzGerald's suggestion that Sinn Fein be admitted to the Northern Executive in advance of decommissioning, Dr Kennedy writes of the consequent need for democrats to "swallow their principles", and wonders if a governing partnership with "people" "linked to the IRA" might not constitute "the final act of appeasement".
His language betrays him.
Principles should never go the way of pride or strong medicine. Respectable political opponents are named, not anonymously dismissed. Links can be forged in steel or in cyberspace, with very different results and implications. Appeasement, especially when viewed as a finality, has more than consonatal similarities with apocalypse.
Dennis Kennedy should spend time in West Belfast, the Bogside or on the Garvaghy Road. There he will hear from Northern Irish working-class Catholics who distrust their neighbours, and who greatly distrust the police force and army put in place for their protection.
He will hear from people whose preoccupations are finding or keeping jobs, feeding and educating their children, paying next month's rent. These same people will tell him that it is armed republicans who keep drug dealers off their streets, armed republicans who keep loyalist gangs on their own side of the line, armed republicans who guarantee the only stability they know. Then, perhaps, Dr Kennedy will begin to understand the enormity of the task facing Gerry Adams.
The republican movement is already creaking from the strain of the fundamental concessions implied by the Good Friday Agreement. If he goes too far, too fast, Gerry Adams will not simply lose his mandate; he will risk seeing the total disintegration of republicanism in the North and the emergence of milita-style groups with agendas all the way from community protection to a full-scale resumption of the terrorist war.
Who will speak to, or for, such groups?
Adversarial rhetoric has polarised Northern Ireland as much as civil rights abuses ever did. As long as the war of words continues, with each side scoring empty points off the other in a debate of the deaf, the possibility of moving towards a new Northern Ireland will remain a frozen fiction. The possibility of returning to the carnage will remain real. - Yours, etc.,
Michael Fitzpatrick, The Gate, Bachelor's Quay, Cork.