Madam, - Few citizens can be other than pleased at the Provisional IRA's permanent ceasefire announced yesterday. An uncompromising end to the senseless slaughter which characterised IRA activity for the past 35 years must be a cause of unconditional joy.
However, it would be a terrible neglect to the memory of the dead if we did not now demand of the IRA and its supporters, overt and covert, what three-and-a-half thousand people died for and for what nearly 40,000 were injured.
When the republican movement split in 1969 the Officials, as those who did what the Provisionals are doing now came to be called, decided that their future lay in political and constitutional politics. That was a decision taken for humane as well as tactical reasons. For the first time some republicans posited that the problem in Ireland was not a simple one of "Brits Out" and that the loyalist population of the six counties had to be taken into account in any future political rearrangement.
The Officials did not deny that nationalists in the North had suffered grievous discrimination and that successive British Governments had refused to deal with this problem, but they realised a united Ireland would have to be by consent of a majority and that majority could not be won by the bomb and the bullet. Among other policies they advocated the return of the Stormont Government and a bill of rights which would end forever discrimination and gerrymandering. For that stance they were almost universally vilified.
What I would now like explained to me and to to all of us who watched with agony as men, women and children, on every side and on none, were sacrificed to the armed struggle of the Provisionals and their IRSP sidekicks, what has been gained that would not have been achieved by political activity?
I know that Gerry Adams has been sanctified as a man of peace and that people such as Bairbre de Brún and Martin McGuinness have been given ministerial positions in the Stormont Government they once so passionately opposed but, as Bob Geldof might say, is that it?
I have always believed that the Provisionals got away with so much because a lax if not downright complicit media did not demand answers to vital questions. I hope these sins of omission will now be purged and that the Irish people, in whose name obscene and terrible deeds were done, will at last get an accounting of what was bought with the blood of thousands of our fellow human beings. - Is mise,
MÁIRÍN DE BURCA, Upper Fairview Avenue, Dublin 3.
Madam, - I grew up in Unionist-gerrymandered Derry in the 1960s, marching behind my teacher John Hume in the Civil Rights Campaign. Through the Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday, I saw the IRA grow out of the circumstances of the times. Committed young men and women they were, many of them friends of mine, willing to give their lives because they saw no other way of achieving full justice and the freedom to be Irish in their own country. That was then.
We have now seen the two sovereign governments and the United States being tough on the IRA, leading, rightly, to the ending of the "armed struggle". That, however, is not enough. It is now time - once and for all - to be tough on the reasons for the IRA. - Yours, etc,
NIGEL COOKE, St Helens, Lancashire, England.
Madam, - So Gerry Adams sails inexorably on in his seemingly unsinkable boat to his journey's end. That end is a seat in our Government. It will happen some day, however regrettable that is. And he will have achieved it all without displaying a shred of honesty and integrity. While he glorifies those who have died for the "cause" and describes them as patriots and volunteers, he has never had the courage to admit his own participation in that "cause" - never admitted to membership of the IRA or being on its Army Council.
That is what is so objectionable about him. He cannot be compared to people like Nelson Mandela or Yasser Arafat, who never hid their "terrorist" activities in the past. In the same breath he will refuse to condemn atrocities, and ask us to "move on", and also say we cannot forget 1916 and the sacrifices of those who lost their lives since.
I am a middle-class Irish Catholic living in the Republic. Gerry Adams does not speak on my behalf or that of anybody I know. I do not aspire to a united Ireland because he has given unity such a bad name by trying to achieve it through violence. - Yours, etc,
PHILIP BOYLE, Carrickbrack Lawn, Sutton, Dublin 13.