Pat Rabbitte is brave. Brave to be complaining about IRA criminality. Brave to be talking about decommissioning. Brave to rely on the youth of much of the electorate, who won't understand why he is so brave, brave to rely on the amnesia of the rest of the electorate, writes Vincent Browne
Pat Rabbitte was a member of the Workers' Party from the early 1970s to 1990. While he was a member of the Workers' Party, an element attached to the Workers' Party, was the Official IRA. It had been engaged in a campaign of violence against the British army in Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1972. During that time it perpetrated a number of atrocities, two of them unforgettable because of their infamy.
On February 22nd, 1972, the Official IRA was responsible for the murder of seven people at the headquarters of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot, England. One of these, Gerry Weston, was the Catholic chaplain to the regiment. Another five were cleaning women. Jill Mansfield, Margaret Grant, Thelma Bosley, Cherie Munton and Joan Lunn. The seventh, John Haslar, was a gardener. The Official IRA said the action was in retaliation for Bloody Sunday. The leaders of Official Sinn Féin (as the precursor to the Workers' Party was then known) exulted in the action.
On May 21st, 1972, the Official IRA in Derry "executed" an 18-year-old local boy, home on leave from a British army base in Germany, staying with his family in the Creggan estate, William Best. He went out to make a phone call and was never seen again alive.
The Official IRA said in a statement: "The ruthlessness shown by British forces against the people of Free Derry could only be answered in similar terms. Regardless of calls for peace from slobbering moderates, while the British gunmen remain on the streets in the Six Counties the (Official) IRA will take action against them."
Later that year the Official IRA went on what it called a "ceasefire", but over the next decade and a half at least - i.e., well into the late 1980s, during all of which time Pat Rabbitte was a member of its political arm - the Official IRA murdered scores of people, terrorised areas in Belfast, shot people in the legs, beat them with crow bars.
A senior member of the Official IRA authorised the murder of Larry White in Cork on June 10th, 1975. On October 5th, 1977, the Official IRA was responsible for the murder at North Strand Road, Dublin, of a leader of a rival political and military organisation, Séamus Costello, president of the newly-formed IRSP and leader of the paramilitary organisation, the INLA. The decision to murder Séamus Costello was taken at a meeting involving several members of the Workers' Party. That murder came after the Official IRA had murdered several members of the breakaway INLA in Belfast in 1977, five years into the "ceasefire".
Meanwhile, the Official IRA engaged in widespread racketeering, armed robberies, and even an elaborate counterfeiting operation. Simultaneously, the Workers' Party appeared remarkably well-resourced, with more full-time operatives than any other party, and a weekly newspaper, the United Irishman.
And throughout all this time never did Pat Rabbitte utter a public word in condemnation of this activity. Indeed, it was his mantra and that of his associate, Éamon Gilmore, to deny that such activities were taking place at all or at least that such activities had any connection with the Workers' Party.
Let's be clear about this: I am not saying that Pat Rabbitte or Éamon Gilmore or indeed any other specific member of the Workers' Party at the time had any involvement in any of these activities. Indeed, I know that Pat Rabbitte and Éamon Gilmore did not. Nor am I saying they had any direct knowledge of what was going on. But they knew at least as much as the rest of us knew at the time, they knew what was published in newspapers and magazines (oddly RTÉ didn't probe into this area then or, come to think of it, subsequently - I wonder why). But knowing what the rest of us knew about the murders, the beatings, the racketeering, the counterfeiting, the armed robberies, they remained in the Workers' Party and defended the Workers' Party against allegations of association with this criminality.
So, with that background, would you not think Pat Rabbitte might be a little less hyper about Provisional IRA criminality nowadays?
You might think that some others would soft-pedal that one, too. Fine Gael engaged in a bit of criminality itself not so long ago, tax fraud in the manner it remunerated its staff and in a fund-raising device (the "pick-me-up" scheme). Fine Gael engaged in quite a bit of criminality and thuggery in its early days, the days of another paramilitary outfit, the Blueshirts.
But all that said, it is absolutely right that the IRA should now be required to end all forms of criminality and undertake that before its political arm enters government in Northern Ireland. And one way of ensuring it did that would be to lift the ban on the IRA, register it as a political organisation and require it to make disclosures of its funding and operations as other parties are required.
(Again I am indebted to the book Lost Lives for some of the material here.)