20 August 1998 Edition
No explanation possible
By Eoghan Mac Cormaic
To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who don't understand, no explanation is possible. So ran the greeting which accompanied countless birthday and Christmas messages for political POWs over much of the seventies and eighties. No explanation was necessary because we understood.
The first reaction to an event of the proportions of last Saturday was that it couldn't have been intentional to kill civilians. Even contemplating the notion that anyone claiming the mantle of Republicanism would deliberately set out to destroy and decimate the lives of innocent men women and children is almost too much to consider. And because of that, and because we know the history of the RUC and the British state, we almost want to speculate on a situation where they played a part in deliberately misunderstanding a warning, of playing little heed to a code word, of directing people the wrong way... And then a wish that there was some hint of a truth in that when the grim knowledge is that there isn't.
The facts, the details, the minutiae of timings, the guesswork of what might have been are all pointless. Twenty eight people are no more, two hundred are no longer the people they were, and we are all numbed in some way by the nature and the extent of the carnage. It is impossible not to be angry.
We've been down roads like this before. Republican bombs have killed, have maimed, have hurt and have destroyed lives. Republican bombs have, no doubt, had the potential to cause as much physical desolation and havoc as Saturday's bomb. And to the world at large one bomb is as bad as another, one loss of life as traumatic as another, one mistake as indiscriminate as another. To the world at large. But to republicans, it is different.
To the thousands of decent, selfless, long-enduring republicans, who spent the best part of thirty years suffering the `stigma' of their political beliefs, bearing the brunt of media and public rebukes, the odium of unrelenting criticism because of IRA operations and actions, this was different. This was different to those who were all too aware of the pain inflicted in our names, and reluctantly accepted the use of physical force as the path of last resort in face of a system that seemed to understand only force because it in turn employed only force. It was different too, because in the grand plan of struggle, each component part, whether the difficult use of armed means, or the increasing use of political struggles and advances, each component part was seen to have a role to play, and each component part was a cog in a wheel which seemed certain, one day, of reaching the goal. We called that legitimacy, we defended it against all slurs, against all odds. And physical force and all the horror of force remained, we hoped, subject to a political goal, to an end justifying the means.
Saturday was different. It was different because it was an end in itself. It was different because it was not a part of a struggle, it was the struggle. It was wrong because it was not a mistake, not something that began as a legitimate action which went wrong, but as part of a reaction, as part of a campaign which is based on unreal analysis and misread circumstance.
The goal, like the earlier summer bombs, is to defeat those who believe that Republicanism can be advanced - and republican goals secured - using changed tactics in changed circumstances. Our politics, in fact, were the true target of the bomb; a provocation to reactionary unionism, to uncertain British politicians, to a Dublin administration under strain. The bomb was an attack on the peace process and its authors, an attempt to destroy not buildings, but the hope that conflict can be resolved and justice, freedom and a peaceful future for all our people secured. The bomb was an attempt to thwart the future.
It is difficult for republicans to contemplate the notion that anyone claiming the mantle of Republicanism would deliberately set out to destroy and decimate the lives and futures of innocent men women and children. But they did.
This time, no other explanation is possible.
To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who don't understand, no explanation is possible. So ran the greeting which accompanied countless birthday and Christmas messages for political POWs over much of the seventies and eighties. No explanation was necessary because we understood.
The first reaction to an event of the proportions of last Saturday was that it couldn't have been intentional to kill civilians. Even contemplating the notion that anyone claiming the mantle of Republicanism would deliberately set out to destroy and decimate the lives of innocent men women and children is almost too much to consider. And because of that, and because we know the history of the RUC and the British state, we almost want to speculate on a situation where they played a part in deliberately misunderstanding a warning, of playing little heed to a code word, of directing people the wrong way... And then a wish that there was some hint of a truth in that when the grim knowledge is that there isn't.
The facts, the details, the minutiae of timings, the guesswork of what might have been are all pointless. Twenty eight people are no more, two hundred are no longer the people they were, and we are all numbed in some way by the nature and the extent of the carnage. It is impossible not to be angry.
We've been down roads like this before. Republican bombs have killed, have maimed, have hurt and have destroyed lives. Republican bombs have, no doubt, had the potential to cause as much physical desolation and havoc as Saturday's bomb. And to the world at large one bomb is as bad as another, one loss of life as traumatic as another, one mistake as indiscriminate as another. To the world at large. But to republicans, it is different.
To the thousands of decent, selfless, long-enduring republicans, who spent the best part of thirty years suffering the `stigma' of their political beliefs, bearing the brunt of media and public rebukes, the odium of unrelenting criticism because of IRA operations and actions, this was different. This was different to those who were all too aware of the pain inflicted in our names, and reluctantly accepted the use of physical force as the path of last resort in face of a system that seemed to understand only force because it in turn employed only force. It was different too, because in the grand plan of struggle, each component part, whether the difficult use of armed means, or the increasing use of political struggles and advances, each component part was seen to have a role to play, and each component part was a cog in a wheel which seemed certain, one day, of reaching the goal. We called that legitimacy, we defended it against all slurs, against all odds. And physical force and all the horror of force remained, we hoped, subject to a political goal, to an end justifying the means.
Saturday was different. It was different because it was an end in itself. It was different because it was not a part of a struggle, it was the struggle. It was wrong because it was not a mistake, not something that began as a legitimate action which went wrong, but as part of a reaction, as part of a campaign which is based on unreal analysis and misread circumstance.
The goal, like the earlier summer bombs, is to defeat those who believe that Republicanism can be advanced - and republican goals secured - using changed tactics in changed circumstances. Our politics, in fact, were the true target of the bomb; a provocation to reactionary unionism, to uncertain British politicians, to a Dublin administration under strain. The bomb was an attack on the peace process and its authors, an attempt to destroy not buildings, but the hope that conflict can be resolved and justice, freedom and a peaceful future for all our people secured. The bomb was an attempt to thwart the future.
It is difficult for republicans to contemplate the notion that anyone claiming the mantle of Republicanism would deliberately set out to destroy and decimate the lives and futures of innocent men women and children. But they did.
This time, no other explanation is possible.