ANALYSIS: IRA may have put paid to Irish republican myth
( 2001-10-25 10:32 ) (7 )

One of the enduring characters of Irish literature, folklore and plays has been the grizzled republican fighter who vows never to lay down his arms until Britain is driven from Northern Ireland.

On Tuesday, that character may have been killed off by the very movement which created him + the Irish Republican Army.

In a move without precedent, and one that many thought could never happen, the IRA announced it had begun to disarm.

It began permanently dismantling a substantial part of Europe's biggest underground arsenal, a massive collection of assault rifles, plastic explosives, handguns, bomb timers and other paraphernalia of urban guerrilla warfare.

"You cannot exaggerate the significance of this," said Paul Arthur, a politics professor at Queens University, Belfast.

"It has broken the links with republican mythology in that while they still do not accept the concept of surrender they have accepted the necessity for the first time for (providing) visible evidence of putting guns beyond use."

A WORLD RADICALLY CHANGED

The move had been widely called for in order to salvage the shattered Northern Irish Good Friday Peace Agreement.

The landmark 1998 power-sharing deal which created a joint Protestant-Roman Catholic provincial government was thrown into a tailspin in July with the resignation of moderate pro-British Unionist First Minister David Trimble. He said he would no longer serve until the IRA made good on disarmament commitments.

But the world has changed radically since then.

The September 11 hijack attacks in the United States not only killed thousands, they also brought home to Irish-Americans, who might have supported the IRA in the past with cash donations, what attacks on urban populations were all about.

The fallout from September 11 had been "a key ingredient" in what would have already been a growing pressure from America for the IRA to destroy weapons, Arthur said.

The arrests in August of three suspected IRA members, who have been charged with training left-wing FARC rebels in Colombia, had already turned up the heat on Sinn Fein in the United States where it raises valuable support dollars.

The Irish government + a partner to the Good Friday deal, along with the British government and the US administration, all leaned hard on the IRA to disarm.

The sign it had come to a head came on Monday when Sinn Fein, taking the heat and losing hard-won political ground because of its links to the IRA, called on the guerrilla movement to disarm. One day later the IRA said it was doing so.

NO IMMEDIATE END TO VIOLENCE

IRA disarmament alone does not mean peace will reign now and forever in the troubled British-ruled province of some 1.5 million people.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was quick to point out that Roman Catholic girls attending a school in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood on the Ardoyne Road are still subjected to daily harassment by Protestants + and have been for two months since school opened.

"If you want to ask people if the war is over, go to the pupils and their parents in north Belfast, children of the Holy Cross School, go to those who are under military occupation in rural parts of the six counties, go to those whose homes have been bombed," he told a television interviewer.

Outside the peace process are more extreme Irish republicans, such as those who support the Real IRA, responsible for the 1998 Omagh bombing which killed 29 people. And renegade pro-British Protestant Loyalist militias have killed at least two Catholics in recent months.

They and the more radical Protestant Unionist militias could keep the pot boiling by continuing the sectarian killings, pipe bombings and other violence that made the past summer in Northern Ireland the bloodiest since the peace deal was signed.

TRIMBLE TO FACE UNIOINIST WRATH

It is now the turn of the moderate Unionists led by Trimble to try to bring more of the Loyalist community onside, in the face of continued objection to the peace process from the Democratic Unionist Party of the Reverend Ian Paisley, and hardline Unionist militias.

Commentators believe Trimble will win the day, and that even the naysayers will come under pressure from London, Dublin and Washington to play their part in bolstering a peace process that the governments say is a much needed beacon of hope for other longrunning global conflicts.

Trimble did not waste a moment trying to get the message across.

"It would have been much better if things had moved@rapidly and more smoothly," Trimble said.

"But we are glad that this has happened and I should also add that we hope that what has happened today is going to be paralleled by action by Loyalist paramilitaries," he added.