Andrew Kearney was out drinking one night in July when he got into a quarrel over a game of cards. He suspected someone of cheating. He called the man outside to settle the difference, and knocked him down. As he left for home, he was told he had better look out for himself.
He worried over the next days. After two weeks, when he was playing one night in his flat in the nationalist New Lodge area of Belfast with his two-week child by his common-law wife, seven men and a woman, all masked, burst in. They took him out along the hallway to the lift, and fired into him. Most of the shots were to his legs, and maybe they meant to cripple him. But the trauma of the shots from the high-velocity weapons and the loss of blood he suffered in the long time it took to get a doctor to the estate killed him.
Those who shot him were not loyalists; it would be a rare loyalist gang that would dare to penetrate so deeply into an area known for its hard republicanism and so dominated by the IRA. The man that Kearney had knocked over, who cannot be named, was a senior officer of the Northern Belfast division of the IRA, as Kearney, from a strongly republican family, knew well. That was the basis of his concern in the two weeks between the fight and his murder. The official could not be seen to be beaten; he had to have the last word.
Over the past few months murders, tortures, punishment beatings and exiles (giving people a warning to leave Ireland within a certain time or be killed) have increased markedly in Northern Ireland. In the Markets area of Belfast, a 17-year-old lad in a burst of bravado told an IRA enforcer who hustled him out of the way to “fuck off”. Later that day, he was told to be on the street at a place and time the following evening; he was then picked up, driven around in a car for half an hour while being beaten, then was taken to waste ground and shot through both ankles. An 18 year old who had been dealing drugs for the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) accumulated debts of £2,500 to the organisation which he could not repay and fled to England. The UDA called on his mother and told him he must come back and continue to deal to pay off his debt or he would be killed.
The known incidents – many will not be reported – are roughly equally split between republican and loyalist gangs. In all, there have been over 450 in the past six months. When this figure was put to Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the House of Commons last week, she agreed with it.
Later during Northern Irish questions, she said that the ceasefires agreed by the paramilitaries still held.
In these answers, Mowlam captured one of the greatest moral hazards to the Good Friday Agreement. Its achievement has seen the Unionist leader, David Trimble, and the nationalist leader, John Hume, receive Nobel peace prizes this week. Yet at the same time anxiety that it was in crisis prompted a Tory-sponsored debate in the Commons. Some Conservatives share a growing conviction that the bipartisan policy of support for the government’s actions can no longer be borne. These doubts have substance. The Good Friday Agreement, hailed as an end to 70 years of both IRA terror and unionist political monopoly, and immediately proposed as a template for settlements everywhere, is crawling through a moral swamp. It may emerge to hard ground with its principles intact; or it may be sucked down on the journey.
Its chief hazard is that it gives a central role to those paramilitary groups which, by declaring a renunciation of the armed struggle, have been brought into the chambers of power. One of the loyalist factions, the UDA, has a representation in the new assembly through the deputies of the Progressive Unionist Party, led by David Ervine; the other major faction, the Ulster Volunteer Force, has none since the political grouping close to it, the Ulster Democratic Party, failed to win enough votes. The real problem, however, is the IRA, whose front organisation, Sinn Fein, increased its share of the vote to 16 per cent, thereby meriting, under the Assembly’s rules, two cabinet ministers. While officials of its armed wing rule whole areas through fear, Sinn Fein has deputies in the assembly and two members of the cabinet. The IRA has so far refused to disarm; refused to endorse exclusively peaceful and democratic measures laid out in the Mitchell principles which govern the peace process; and has certainly not renounced its aim of securing a united Ireland well within the lifetime of its now generally middle-aged leaders.
This makes the murders and beatings in Belfast and elsewhere in the province fundamentally different in nature from the violence which accompanies crime in other UK cities. On the mainland, it is beyond the pale; in Northern Ireland, it is claiming seats in government. As the number of incidents and their brutality rise, both unionist and nationalist communities grow increasingly cynical about the efficacy of the Good Friday Agreement.
Both loyalist and republican groups live through terror, extortion and drug dealing, though the republican groups tend to levy a fee on dealers rather than deal themselves. The loyalist gangs are fiercely competitive and have no high command structure; in the republican areas, however, the IRA dominates to the point where it can usually enforce a monopoly over the control of weapons and, in most places, of terror. It also has a sophisticated command structure with political intelligence capabilities and international links. Throughout the campaign of the past 30 years, it has negotiated directly with the British government; and it now has a substantial democratic mandate. “For most of this century,” says David Ervine of the Progressive Unionists, “the IRA has regarded itself as a government-in-waiting, the legitimate government of the whole island of Ireland.”
Among those who warn that the Agreement is now being undermined by the continuing violence of terrorists who had “renounced terrorism” is Vincent McKenna, who helps run an organisation called Families Against Intimidation and Terror. McKenna, with the director Sam Cushnahan, are in a strange situation; they do what police forces should do, in that they provide a port of call for men and women who have been or are about to be dealt with by criminals. Yet the facts of life in Northern Ireland mean that many of these men and women, especially but not exclusively on the republican side, cannot or will not go to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
McKenna is a former IRA man, who left the organisation in 1991 because he was “sick of the lies and the hypocrisy”. He worked as an intelligence officer, which meant that he set people up for assassination – and one day found himself setting up an RUC man whose family lived a few yards from his (he had been brought up in a largely Protestant area) and whose brother had just been killed in a traffic accident. He could not do it; nor could he stop it. One day, he went into a bar where the RUC man was drinking, wrote his car number and route to work on a cigarette packet together with the sentence, “you have 14 days to get out”. Now out of the organisation, he hates the violence but does not seem to fear it. He was beaten up, he says, in September by half a dozen IRA enforcers when he insisted on conducting surveys among the Catholic population of the Lower Ormeau Road which showed that most would be indifferent to Orange parades through their areas so long as they were not triumphalist in nature – quite different to the view, which the IRA insisted was unanimous, that the Catholics regarded it as an outrage.
A year after he joined the IRA in 1981one of his commanders told him: “We get our respect from one thing and one thing only: through fear. Don’t forget it.” McKenna, who with Cushnahan came to London last week to brief MPs on the growing violence, believes that the de facto position of the British government – that the ceasefires remain “in place” so long as the paramilitaries only terrorise their own – is now eroding all respect for the Agreement. He says: “God forgive Mo Mowlam. She went on Ulster TV and thanked Gerry Adams for disciplining the Real IRA after they planted the bomb at Omagh [which killed 28 people]. Gerry Adams would have cared not a thing for this, but it killed some of his own supporters. The IRA let the Real IRA take the explosives needed for that job. Gerry Adams is saying to Mowlam: ‘Look, you deal with me, or this is what you’ll get’.”
The dilemma – as the Labour MP Harry Barnes put it in the Commons debate on Wednesday – is whether one believes the IRA has made a tactical, or a strategic, ceasefire. The latter means that violence has been renounced, and that local officials trying to keep their communities in thrall are the ones responsible for the thuggery and murders. A tactical ceasefire means the Good Friday Agreement is no more than another station in the long road to the republican goal.
There are a number of reasons for believing that the tactical option is the more likely. First, the organisation is extensively criminalised and relies hugely on terror. Intelligence reports suggest they may be about to cull recalcitrant leaders, to enforce authority and show the communities they are an effective “police force”.
Second, the hatred of the British and of the unionist population in the North seems unabated. McKenna recalls the aims of the organisation to “ethnically cleanse” border areas like South Armagh of all Protestants. These areas are still “no-go” for the RUC.
Third, the RUC is now under review by a commission headed by the former Hong Kong governor and Tory cabinet minister Chris Patten. Many – such as the Irish writer and unionist Conor Cruise O’Brien – believe it will “neuter” the RUC; it is certainly likely to reform it, disarm some of its officers and reduce their numbers.
The growing militancy among the unionists is evinced in greater support for the all but defunct protest at Drumcree over a ban on marching. The increasing difficulty over the implementation of the agreement; the IRA’s unyielding opposition to decommissioning weapons; the deepening cynicism and despair of the communities – all threaten what had been seen as the greatest achievement of this government.
But one element may be changing. After Andrew Kearney died, his mother Maureen decided to do more than mourn him. A tough and articulate woman in her early 60s, she now seeks publicity for her demand that the perpetrators of the murder – known to her and to the police – be brought to justice. When I saw her earlier this week, she said that if she could get proof, she would do so, even if it meant collaborating with the RUC. “They can’t do anything worse to me,” she said. “I tell people, for God’s sake stand up to them! It’s the only way.” It may be the only way, but it is a very hard way, especially for those who go down it first. If it proves too hard, the Agreement may be lost.
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