Irish awakening: What McCartney sisters are really sayng about the IRA (Boston Globe) -- Irish Media Watch Message Board

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Date Posted: 21:23:48 03/12/05 Sat GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Irish awakening: What McCartney sisters are really sayng about the IRA (Boston Globe)

Irish wakening

What the McCartney sisters are really saying to the IRA
By Kevin Cullen | March 13, 2005

FOR MORE THAN 30 years, the Irish Republican Army fought the British Army to a draw, and defied demands by the overwhelming majority of Irish people to stop killing-only to be brought to its knees in recent weeks by five sisters from one of its traditional Belfast strongholds.

After Robert McCartney, a 33-year-old fork lift operator, was stabbed to death on Jan. 30 by IRA men following a barroom row in Belfast, his five sisters voiced outrage, not only over his murder but the IRA's elaborate effort to destroy evidence and intimidate witnesses. The sisters' insistent demand for justice has gained concessions: The IRA expelled three members it said were involved in the murder, while Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, expelled seven members. And it won the sisters an invitation to join President Bush at the White House St. Patrick's Day party on Thursday-an event that, for the first time since 1995, pointedly excludes all of Northern Ireland's political leaders.

But more significantly, the McCartney sisters have won the backing of longtime IRA supporters, who for some 35 years were prepared to tolerate IRA violence, even in their own communities.

The peace process in Northern Ireland has started and stalled for more than a decade, in large part because IRA leaders have refused to explicitly say their war is over. Now the McCartney sisters have said it for them, insisting that the use of summary violence and intimidation is no longer acceptable. When the IRA, according to a statement it issued last week, offered to execute four men involved in the murder, the sisters stood their ground. By saying they wanted their brother's killers to be investigated by police and prosecuted in the courts, institutions that IRA supporters have long rejected as illegitimate, the McCartneys are challenging the very premise for the IRA's continued existence.

Throughout the bitter civil war quaintly known as The Troubles, republicans-Irish nationalists who believe physical force is justified to end British control of Northern Ireland-defended the IRA's right to kill British soldiers, police officers, and other ''legitimate targets,'' an elastic term the IRA used to include just about anyone it deemed expendable. What others saw as atrocities-blowing up a judge and his elderly wife, shooting off-duty policemen in front of their children-republicans justified as acts of war. In vulnerable Catholic neighborhoods, like the Short Strand section of Belfast where the McCartney family has lived for generations, the IRA were seen as defenders against loyalist gangs who killed Catholics at random, British soldiers who kicked down their doors, and a police force that was overwhelmingly Protestant and hostile to the communities that supplied the IRA its members.

Successive governments, and much of the news media, portrayed the IRA as a bunch of criminals hiding behind a political cause, but the IRA and its supporters rejected attempts to criminalize its armed struggle. When the IRA robbed banks, or took businessmen or race horses hostage for ransom, what just about everyone else saw as a crime republicans saw as funding the war effort. Even now, some of the same people who are outraged at McCartney's murder have greeted allegations that the IRA was behind a $50 million bank heist in Belfast in December with yawns and jokes.

''At least I'll get me pension,'' one former IRA man told me over the phone after the robbery, only half-jokingly.

But another former IRA man from Belfast, Anthony McIntyre, said the Provos have shot themselves in the foot by allowing their ranks to become swelled with thugs-men that IRA veterans derisively refer to as ''cease-fire soldiers'' who have risked neither life nor liberty for the cause and who engage in the kind of intimidation and violence against young nationalists once doled out by the police, the British Army, and loyalist paramilitaries.

The republican self-image has long been one of self-sacrifice, not self-aggrandizement. As the mother of Joe McDonnell-one of ten republicans who died on hunger strike in 1981 demanding political prisoner status-told me over a cup of tea in her living room years ago, ''Criminals don't starve themselves to death.''

But McIntyre says the IRA he proudly served is squandering its reputation among republicans. ''The IRA used to be an army,'' he said. ''Now it's a militia, and it's close to becoming a gang.''

. . .

In the past, when the IRA made what it called mistakes-such as killing a 6-month-old girl in an ambush that also killed her off-duty Royal Air Force father in 1989, or killing two boys with a bomb near Liverpool in 1993-it apologized. But it seldom disciplined its members for carelessness or sloppiness, nor was there much pressure from their grassroots to do so.

Even after the IRA called a cease-fire in 1994, paving the way for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the IRA continued to kill people, mostly those who challenged its authority in its own backyard. According to police, the IRA has killed at least 20 people since 1994.

Republicans would occasionally break ranks, especially when one of their loved ones was on the receiving end of a beating or execution. In 1991, after the IRA killed one of its own members, Paddy Flood, claiming he was an informer, his wife lashed out at her husband's erstwhile comrades and said she empathized with the widows of British soldiers and policemen. But mostly republicans kept their mouths shut, sharing poet Seamus Heaney's take on his native Northern Ireland: ''Whatever you say, say nothing.''

Another of the IRA's victims was Andrew Kearney. In 1998, after Kearney died in a punishment shooting that the IRA claimed was not meant to be fatal, his mother, Maureen Kearney, told me she held Eddie Copeland, the reputed IRA commander in North Belfast, responsible. Her son had bested Copeland in a barroom fight, and Copeland had sent an IRA squad to settle the score, she said. The IRA men broke the door down in the predawn hours, told Kearney to put aside his infant daughter asleep on his chest, dragged him to a hallway, and shot him. The IRA men tore the phone from the wall and disabled the elevator, forcing Kearney's girlfriend to scramble down eight flights of stairs to look for help because none of the neighbors would open their doors. Kearney bled to death.

Maureen Kearney had always supported the IRA, and even after the killing she kept her mouth shut, discreetly meeting with IRA commanders to demand an explanation. But she went public when she found their excuses unacceptable, saying on TV and in the newspapers that a ''gangster element'' within the IRA had disgraced the republican movement. For her candor, she was shunned by other republicans.

Seven years later, the same sort of people who mounted a whispering campaign against Maureen Kearney are cheering on the McCartney sisters. That the IRA offered to shoot four men it said were involved in McCartney's murder suggests how far outside the mainstream it remains. That the McCartney sisters spurned that offer-saying they wanted justice in a courtroom, not revenge in an alley-is evidence that some of those in the neighborhoods from which the Provisional IRA rose no longer view it as their defender.

Kevin Cullen, the Globe's former Dublin and London bureau chief, has covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for nearly 20 years.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

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