EVIL MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO FLOURISH
Evil must not be allowed to flourish
By MAURICE HAYES
WHEN Benedict Kiely wrote his novella Proxopera the classic description of a proxy car bombing, even he could not have envisaged in his fiction the carnage inflicted and the destruction wrought on his beloved Omagh.
Omagh now tops the table of the most appallingly destructive, most murderous single events of the current troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Feast of the Assumption will go down with Bloody Sunday on the rubric of indiscriminate and murderous violence.
As the story unfolds on the news bulletins, the full horror begins to be disclosed of human loss and suffering, of bodies mangled and blown apart, of the cries of children seeking their parents and parents anxiously waiting to discover the fate of their babies, hopes dashed and innocence destroyed. There is no counting the human cost, no calculus which fully expresses the disruption to families, the deaths of loved ones, the desecration of a community and a town blown apart at the centre.
This should not have happened to Omagh. More than most towns in Northern Ireland it has over the years been a model of good community relations, with Protestants and Catholics, nationalists and unionists living together in peace and tolerance and relative harmony. Together they have brought the town through the crises of conflicts of the last 30 years, preserving all the time a sense of sanity and decency and an awareness of the value of life and the dignity of the human person. Sadly, just when they were celebrating the advent of peace, the endorsement of the Agreement and the dawn of a new day for all, that, as they celebrated their Community Relations Carnival, blind and intemperate bigotry should strike so savagely and maim and kill so arbitrarily.
As I write, the death toll is still rising. There are many people still unaccounted for and a possibility that some may never be found for a few more days Omagh will be the centre of world attention and then they will be left to grieve on their own.
Only those intimately concerned can know the pain, the loss, the consequent shock, the awfulness of memory. And yet the signs are that Omagh, like Enniskillen, will absorb outrage and suffering and emerge from the furnace of atrocity with a united purpose not to let the bombers win, to rebuild shattered hopes and shattered lives and to reaffirm their desire for a peaceful way to settle differences.
It is now generally accepted that the bomb was the work of dissident republican splinter groups. It was always to be expected that there would be bitter opposition in republican ranks to the Good Friday agreement.
It was also foreseeable that some of those would carry their opposition on by violent means. The punctuation of the last year by bombs at Moyra, Portadown, Newtownhamilton and Banbridge and the interception of other bombs in transit by the Gardai was a sufficient indication that the dissident factions were, if anything, growing in strength and expertise and have access to explosives and weaponry in significant quantity. It was always to be expected too that the settlement would be challenged violently and that the more the success of the peace process seemed to be assured, the more violent the attacks on it were likely to be.
What we may now be seeing is the ultimate republican split, the time when Sinn Fein and those in the IRA who are committed to ending the struggle and diversifying into politics finally abandon the position that all sections of the movement can be brought along with them.
HISTORY SHOWS that there have always been those who regarded the adoption of a political programme as betrayal. All human experience suggests that there are those who will not lay down their arms, who will prefer to pursue a hopeless and destructive campaign of violence regardless of the cost or the outcome.
These are the men (and women) who do not, and never will, accept the will of the people as long as that is expressed in terms with which they disagree. The people, they imply, have no right to do wrong even by a majority of nine to one. The single and most important motor of change in recent years has been the endorsement of the agreement by 95pc of those voting in a high turnout in referenda in nationalist and republican areas, North and South. As John Hume argued it would, that vote removed any vestige of moral justification or respectability from the armed struggle. The choice was between politics and the war, between absolutism and compromise, and the people resoundingly backed those politicians who made the agreement.
Which is why it is important in the wake of an unexpected and unhoped for atrocity, to reassess the primacy of politics. This is what the parties are now doing, Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam, Bertie Ahern and Seamus Mallon, and Sinn Fein, all asserting the common interest of those who made the Agreement to carry it into effect, and the common purpose to face down the men of violence.
In this context, Martin McGuinness's forthright condemnation of the bombing is perhaps the most unambiguous statement to come from Sinn Fein.
In this context too, unionists should begin to see Sinn Fein as partners in the common purpose and not as part of the common enemy. Sinn Fein might begin to see those who made the Agreement with them as a better bet for the future than erstwhile colleagues who now excoriate them as traitors.
The Omagh bomb has undoubtedly cratered the road to peace, but not entirely blocked it. It makes it easier for unionists to argue that if arms had been taken in, this would not have happened and the very scale of the atrocity demolishes the concept of the political crime on which prisoner release is based.
It puts a considerable strain too on the fragile loyalist ceasefires, particularly vulnerable now that the UDA are unrepresented in the Assembly and it creates a demand for more intensive security measures.
The governments too will be under pressure to produce results. Either the dissidents or the small splinter groups which should not be allowed to subvert the rule of law or the will of the people or they are a growing force which should not be allowed to reach critical mass.
In either case, more than rhetoric will be required. What is needed now is hard information which will lead to the apprehension of the bombers and prevent further outrages.
These bombs have to be assembled and moved and placed, and cars stolen and getaway cars arranged. These things do not happen in a vacuum without some people, perhaps many people noticing. The terrorists can survive only as long as there is cover.
THE CHOICE is for the host community which has so emphatically rejected violence at the ballot box to withdraw that cover and to refuse to allow evil to flourish. This time rhetorical ritual denunciations by politicians are not enough all are in the struggle together and all will lose if politics are allowed to fail.
By now, the British government may be regretting the political correctness which led to the removal of the power to intern from the statute books, and unionists will be looking for a specific performance by Bertie Ahern on his undertaking to hunt down the perpetrators. The sooner they are brought to book, the better the prospect for the peace process.
By MAURICE HAYES
WHEN Benedict Kiely wrote his novella Proxopera the classic description of a proxy car bombing, even he could not have envisaged in his fiction the carnage inflicted and the destruction wrought on his beloved Omagh.
Omagh now tops the table of the most appallingly destructive, most murderous single events of the current troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Feast of the Assumption will go down with Bloody Sunday on the rubric of indiscriminate and murderous violence.
As the story unfolds on the news bulletins, the full horror begins to be disclosed of human loss and suffering, of bodies mangled and blown apart, of the cries of children seeking their parents and parents anxiously waiting to discover the fate of their babies, hopes dashed and innocence destroyed. There is no counting the human cost, no calculus which fully expresses the disruption to families, the deaths of loved ones, the desecration of a community and a town blown apart at the centre.
This should not have happened to Omagh. More than most towns in Northern Ireland it has over the years been a model of good community relations, with Protestants and Catholics, nationalists and unionists living together in peace and tolerance and relative harmony. Together they have brought the town through the crises of conflicts of the last 30 years, preserving all the time a sense of sanity and decency and an awareness of the value of life and the dignity of the human person. Sadly, just when they were celebrating the advent of peace, the endorsement of the Agreement and the dawn of a new day for all, that, as they celebrated their Community Relations Carnival, blind and intemperate bigotry should strike so savagely and maim and kill so arbitrarily.
As I write, the death toll is still rising. There are many people still unaccounted for and a possibility that some may never be found for a few more days Omagh will be the centre of world attention and then they will be left to grieve on their own.
Only those intimately concerned can know the pain, the loss, the consequent shock, the awfulness of memory. And yet the signs are that Omagh, like Enniskillen, will absorb outrage and suffering and emerge from the furnace of atrocity with a united purpose not to let the bombers win, to rebuild shattered hopes and shattered lives and to reaffirm their desire for a peaceful way to settle differences.
It is now generally accepted that the bomb was the work of dissident republican splinter groups. It was always to be expected that there would be bitter opposition in republican ranks to the Good Friday agreement.
It was also foreseeable that some of those would carry their opposition on by violent means. The punctuation of the last year by bombs at Moyra, Portadown, Newtownhamilton and Banbridge and the interception of other bombs in transit by the Gardai was a sufficient indication that the dissident factions were, if anything, growing in strength and expertise and have access to explosives and weaponry in significant quantity. It was always to be expected too that the settlement would be challenged violently and that the more the success of the peace process seemed to be assured, the more violent the attacks on it were likely to be.
What we may now be seeing is the ultimate republican split, the time when Sinn Fein and those in the IRA who are committed to ending the struggle and diversifying into politics finally abandon the position that all sections of the movement can be brought along with them.
HISTORY SHOWS that there have always been those who regarded the adoption of a political programme as betrayal. All human experience suggests that there are those who will not lay down their arms, who will prefer to pursue a hopeless and destructive campaign of violence regardless of the cost or the outcome.
These are the men (and women) who do not, and never will, accept the will of the people as long as that is expressed in terms with which they disagree. The people, they imply, have no right to do wrong even by a majority of nine to one. The single and most important motor of change in recent years has been the endorsement of the agreement by 95pc of those voting in a high turnout in referenda in nationalist and republican areas, North and South. As John Hume argued it would, that vote removed any vestige of moral justification or respectability from the armed struggle. The choice was between politics and the war, between absolutism and compromise, and the people resoundingly backed those politicians who made the agreement.
Which is why it is important in the wake of an unexpected and unhoped for atrocity, to reassess the primacy of politics. This is what the parties are now doing, Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam, Bertie Ahern and Seamus Mallon, and Sinn Fein, all asserting the common interest of those who made the Agreement to carry it into effect, and the common purpose to face down the men of violence.
In this context, Martin McGuinness's forthright condemnation of the bombing is perhaps the most unambiguous statement to come from Sinn Fein.
In this context too, unionists should begin to see Sinn Fein as partners in the common purpose and not as part of the common enemy. Sinn Fein might begin to see those who made the Agreement with them as a better bet for the future than erstwhile colleagues who now excoriate them as traitors.
The Omagh bomb has undoubtedly cratered the road to peace, but not entirely blocked it. It makes it easier for unionists to argue that if arms had been taken in, this would not have happened and the very scale of the atrocity demolishes the concept of the political crime on which prisoner release is based.
It puts a considerable strain too on the fragile loyalist ceasefires, particularly vulnerable now that the UDA are unrepresented in the Assembly and it creates a demand for more intensive security measures.
The governments too will be under pressure to produce results. Either the dissidents or the small splinter groups which should not be allowed to subvert the rule of law or the will of the people or they are a growing force which should not be allowed to reach critical mass.
In either case, more than rhetoric will be required. What is needed now is hard information which will lead to the apprehension of the bombers and prevent further outrages.
These bombs have to be assembled and moved and placed, and cars stolen and getaway cars arranged. These things do not happen in a vacuum without some people, perhaps many people noticing. The terrorists can survive only as long as there is cover.
THE CHOICE is for the host community which has so emphatically rejected violence at the ballot box to withdraw that cover and to refuse to allow evil to flourish. This time rhetorical ritual denunciations by politicians are not enough all are in the struggle together and all will lose if politics are allowed to fail.
By now, the British government may be regretting the political correctness which led to the removal of the power to intern from the statute books, and unionists will be looking for a specific performance by Bertie Ahern on his undertaking to hunt down the perpetrators. The sooner they are brought to book, the better the prospect for the peace process.
Further Information
Publisher: IRISH INDEPENDENT
Ref: II/029
Published Date: 17-Aug-98
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