Every armed organisation that was involved in the Troubles here defined and proclaimed its own standards — and all of them broke those standards.
o law entitled soldiers to open fire on unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy, Ardoyne, Derry, or Springhill, or in numerous other locations.
In the aftermath of mass killings at Ballymurphy and on Bloody Sunday, the Army and the government insisted that only identified armed targets were fired on.
Those claims have not held up and there have even been apologies from prime ministers. These are inadequate responses to murder by state forces, but they are something.
Loyalist paramilitaries proclaimed that they had standards, too. They often issued statements saying that they had no grievance against uninvolved Catholics. In one statement in 1972, they even — absurdly, but probably to impress the British — invited Catholics to seek refuge in loyalist areas for their own safety.
Yet, over and over again, those organisations killed Catholic men and women who had no links to the IRA and posed no threats to anyone.
In the 1994 ceasefire statement professing “abject remorse”, the loyalists maintained the supercilious bearing of people who felt they had done a good job and made a contribution as responsible people to war and to peace.
Actually, many of them were horrific barbarians. I once asked a UDA brigadier why they killed taxi drivers and the idiot said back to me: “Who was it drove away the two corporals to be killed? A taxi driver. Right?”
And the republican groups, the Provisional IRA, the Official IRA, the INLA and others, proclaimed that they also operated within an understanding of some targets being legitimate and some not.
They can rationalise the murder of Tommy Bulloch in Fermanagh because he was a soldier in the UDR, but why kill his wife, Emily, beside him? Who was the beast that did that?
Sometimes, the IRA flexed definitions to include people who were previously excluded. The bombing of the workers’ bus at Teebane followed a decision to include within the legitimate target category people who worked for the security forces.
All of those organisations should admit that they often murdered people who were outside their own proclaimed definitions of legitimate targets, just as the British did.
If we can’t hold them to civilised standards, can we not at least hold them to their own?
Currently, the British Government is working to give all these groups and others — the IPLO, Tara, Saor Eire, the Red Hand Commando, the B Specials — an amnesty.
The Provisionals are likely to be the chief beneficiary of this, but say they do not want it and Sinn Fein even hopes to take the leadership of the political challenge to the plan.
They hope to do that without even taking their seats in Westminster to join the debate. But that’s an old argument, so here’s a new one.
At various stages of the peace process, the IRA, through Sinn Fein, asked the British for confidence-building measures.
These included prisoner releases, the lifting of restrictions like the broadcasting ban, the dismantling of Army bases and watchtowers.
What about the former paramilitaries offering some confidence-building measures now, too?
Two young women walked into the Abercorn with a bomb. They joined the queue at the counter until a table came free and then jumped that queue to take it.
They knew the place was crowded. They knew the time at which their bomb was set to go off and yet they left it and gave no adequate warning — not that there would have been time to clear the place.
Would it hurt the IRA to name the women who disgraced their own proclaimed standards in that way, particularly if they are dead, or are no longer part of their organisation?
The IRA not only stands over its “legitimate actions”, but defends people who, by those standards, were war criminals within their organisation.
And many of those people are dead now. Joe Cahill is dead, Bobby Storey, Dolours Price, Pat McGeown and all the dead hunger strikers, who were bombers and killers before they were caught.
Jim Bryson, Tom Toland, Sean Convery, all dead and beyond suffering any harm if their actions are disclosed, and many of them rumoured to have been involved in atrocities which broke the IRA’s own proclaimed standards.
How many people did Martin McGuinness kill? Were they all legitimate targets?
Gerry Adams has said there is no corporate IRA entity still existing. But when information was needed on the Disappeared, something like an honest effort was made to locate them.
It would do the IRA no harm to tell us now the names of the people on the Army Council that decided on the bombing of civilian targets, who approved sectarian murders like the bombing of the Four Step Inn. Some of them are dead now, too.
Who decided that the IRA would shoot people who didn’t stop at their checkpoints during the 1972 ceasefire the way the Brits did?
The only way republicans can authoritatively demand truth from the British Government is by setting the standard themselves and they don’t have to deny their own tradition to do it, but merely call to account those who betrayed that tradition through the murder and maiming of people the movement had determined were not legitimate targets.
Mary Lou McDonald could disown them, ask for their names to be removed from rolls of honour.
Some hope!
