Minister McDowell on Sinn Fein/IRA

dublin | crime and justice | news report Thursday January 13, 2005 18:35 by Reality Check

A stirring statement by the Minister for Justice on the recent Sinn Fein/IRA bank raid

Statement issued by
Michael McDowell, TD
Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform
Thursday, 13 January 2005

The recent attribution of the Northern Bank robbery in Belfast to the Provisional IRA was done by the Chief Constable of the PSNI after careful consideration of the progress of the investigation. It was not done with a view to having a political effect. I have found Hugh Orde to be a level-headed, professional, and honest police man who is dedicated to the good of the people who rely on the PSNI to uphold the law. I have found him to be completely dedicated to the tasks set for him by the Good Friday Agreement. I have found him to be resolutely supportive of that Agreement and its even-handed implementation. Furthermore, the record shows that Hugh Orde has always worked energetically towards the creation of a comprehensive, cross-community involvement in and support for the policing of Northern Ireland.

I have no reason at all to disbelieve or discount his assessment on which the attribution was made.

The degree of trust which he has earned contrasts completely with the gross degradation of trust by those who criticise him most and who now impugn his motivation.

Adams’ Comments on Robberies

"The IRA has denied any involvement and I accept that," Mr Gerry Adams said after the major robbery. He went on to say, “Crimes like this can play no part in the republican struggle and those who are seeking to blame Sinn Fein know this."

But the Sinn Féin president wasn’t speaking of the Northern Bank robbery when he uttered those words.

He spoke those words in June 1996 after a gang of IRA men killed Garda Jerry McCabe while robbing a post office van in Adare, Co Limerick.

Note carefully that these words underline and re-echo his recent theme that Provo members simply do not commit crimes. Note also that those who attributed blame to the Provos for that vicious crime are, as usual, themselves accused of bad faith. The constant implication is that they are hostile to the peace process.

Now reconcile his claim that such crimes can play no part in the Republican struggle with the nauseating posed photographs by Sinn Fein’s TDs with the McCabe killers and their publication in the Sinn Fein newspaper. Contrast those words, too, with his recent ever so plausible but disgraceful excuse on the Late Late show that the Adare killing was the subject of “low-level” authorisation by the Provisional movement.

Now, concerning the Northern Bank heist, the IRA has been making denials again. And, once more, that’s been good enough for Mr Adams. "The IRA has said it wasn't involved," he said this week. "I believe that to be the case."

Does any sane person believe that the IRA or Sinn Fein would now acknowledge that it had carried out the Northern Bank robbery?

For the Provisional movement - Sinn Féin and the IRA- have lied repeatedly about criminality when it suited them. They initially denied involvement in the Enniskillen bombing in 1987. They denied involvement in the importation of weapons from Florida one year after the Good Friday Agreement was concluded. They even denied having a representative in Cuba when asked about the arrest of Niall Connolly in Columbia.

This week, Mr Martin McGuinness asserted that “Gerry Adams and I work on the basis that you can’t tell lies within the peace process. If you tell lies you get caught out and then irreparable damage is done…”

That statement would be risible if its implications were not so deadly serious. Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness have made a career in the Peace Process of over-promising and under-delivering.

Mr McGuinness and his party told George Mitchell and David Trimble, in 1999, that IRA decommissioning would happen after the Northern Ireland Executive was first set up. They undertook that it would start by January 30th, 2000. No act of decommissioning took place by then and the Executive collapsed as a result.

In early 2003, the Irish Government was led to believe that it was the intention of the Provisionals to hold the requisite Army Conventions to end IRA paramilitarism.

Subsequent events, as catalogued in the IMC report and as brought by me to the attention of the Irish people, demonstrate a radical inability on the part of the Provisionals to end paramilitarism. The Tohill episode and the ongoing training and criminal activities of the IRA, cited by both the IMC and myself, demonstrate that a very different state of affairs exists.

The Provisionals are in a state of denial about the true implications of the Good Friday Agreement for paramilitarism and criminality. Unless the IRA ceases to be an armed paramilitary body; unless it categorically ends for good the activities mentioned by the two Governments in paragraph 13 of their joint declaration; unless its members desist from any activity which endangers the rights and safety of others, there is simply no way open for any political progress for any party or politician who owes allegiance to the IRA or is in any way connected with it.

On this, as I said in Dail Eireann before Christmas and before all the latest events unfolded, there can be “no fudge, no budge” by the Irish Government or the Irish people.

Let me make it clear in terms that anyone, even those who live in the parallel universe of Provo theory, self-deception and mythology, can understand.

There is and can be no room in representative politics or in governmental institutions anywhere on this island for any political party allied to any group or body which:

· Supports the use or threatened use of force or violence
· Possesses firearms or explosives
· Violently resists An Garda Siochana or the PSNI
· Usurps the policing function in any part of this island
· Engages in robbery or theft
· Threatens to kill
· Exiles
· Mutilates by punishment beatings
· Extorts and blackmails
· Smuggles and counterfeits


The small minority in the media who pander to the Provisional agenda should always remind themselves of the fact that the IRA Chief of Staff took an oath to deny involvement in the IRA before a Dublin jury as part of a plan to cripple media free speech and to get damages for being revealed for what he was. They might also keep in their minds the name of the witness who swore up against him and was believed by that jury. He was found battered to death near the border.

Small wonder that the Provisionals are now backing a new daily newspaper heavily featured in last week’s An Phoblacht. Will it be to Irish democracy what the Volkischer Beobachter was to pre-WWII German democracy?

We should not passively stand by as a naked plan to subvert democracy by those who are allied to such a movement is put into effect. We are being invited into the Orwellian nightmare of the Provo parallel universe where truth becomes falsehood, where words mean only what the speaker wishes them to mean, and where common humanity is expendable in pursuit of insatiable ideology.

Central to this project is a plan to re-write history and to baptise the most brutal, cowardly, blood-soaked, divisive, anti-republican, sectarian, hate-driven and destructive terror campaign as an heroic struggle for peace and human rights. As the Provo propaganda machine gears itself up to claim against all historical truth that they are the party founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, we can see a crazy “centenary myth” developing before our eyes, designed to fool those with short memories and no knowledge of Irish history into believing a grotesque falsehood. Why?

As George Orwell himself said: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

If Arthur Griffith’s political departure of 1905 is to be celebrated, then all of its political descendants, of which there is a good number, have far better claim as true inheritors than the Provisionals who constantly disown the political stance later taken by him and the great majority of those who, however they may differed on the Treaty, ultimately remained loyal to the principles of democracy.

The Massive Untruth
The massive untruth at the heart of Sinn Féin is that it claims to operate as an organisation wholly separate from the IRA. In fact, as the Taoiseach has said repeatedly, Sinn Féin and the IRA are two sides of one coin. The Independent Monitoring Commission concluded that there was an overlap at senior leadership level between the IRA and Sinn Féin. That confirmed what I had previously said about the presence of household names on the Army Council.

In this context it is as well to remember that every single body dumped, with hands bound and with a bullet wound to the head by the side of the road by Volunteers was a few hours earlier a living human whose murder was personally authorised by the Army Council’s members. Many of them were the subject of unspeakable physical and psychological torture in the hours preceding their murder carried out with the knowledge of people who now pose as champions of prisoners’ rights,

The IMC also confirmed ongoing criminality by the IRA in relation to torture mutilation and cited one example of what, as the IMC rightly pointed out, some people wrongly refer to as “punishment beatings” in which a recent IRA victim was badly beaten around the head with pick axe handles and shot nine times in the lower legs.

So much for the human rights agenda of Sinn Fein. Such actions by IRA “Civil Administration Units” are “lawful” in the eyes of the political hierarchy of the Provo movement and can never be condemned by Sinn Fein (who don’t do the “politics of condemnation”).

It follows that the senior Sinn Féin figures who play a senior role in the IRA are responsible for the pattern of violence, kidnapping, exiling and torture which the IMC is satisfied are under the control of the IRA’s most senior leadership. This responsibility must also apply to the recent Northern Bank robbery.

Perhaps the best explanation for the role of the Sinn Féin/IRA leadership in the recent Northern Bank robbery may be found in Ed Moloney’s “Secret History of the IRA” where he describes the killing of an innocent man in an IRA bank robbery in Newry in November 1994, a time when the IRA were on ceasefire.

The victim, Frank Kerr, a fifty-three-year old single Catholic from South Armagh, died when three armed raiders dressed as postal workers held up staff in the main sorting office and tied them up. Kerr resisted, struggled with the robbers, and was gunned down. The robbery had been carried out by the South Armagh IRA but it was very quickly disowned by the Army Council, which claimed that the operation, while the work of its members, had not been sanctioned by its leadership. Publicly Adams expressed shock at the killing , and Father Reid travelled to Dublin to assure officials that this was indeed the case. Reid had however been misinformed. According to IRA sources the robbery had been given a broad sanction by the Army Council, inasmuch as general permission had been granted to continue “fund-raising” activity, cease-fire or no cease-fire.

Notably, on that occasion, Mr Adams said: “Many people will be concerned also at the way in which the RUC has sought to blame republicans for this killing. The RUC is engaged in a transparent attempt to damage the peace process.” Within weeks the IRA admitted that the murder and robbery was in fact an IRA operation.

Sinn Féin and the IRA have excelled in building plausible deniability into their darker operations. The problem for the Provisionals is that they are so predictable in their approach that their denials have become wholly implausible.

The Real Nature of Sinn Fein’s Relationship to the IRA

What is the significance of all of this? To understand the real nature of the Provisional movement and the real relationship of the IRA with Sinn Féin, it is only necessary to have access to what the Provisionals believe among themselves on these subjects.

Documents recovered from the Provisionals reveal that all members of the IRA are required to learn and to subscribe to a simple but deep-seated ideological proposition; “the Provisional Army Council and its successors were the inheritors of the First and Second Dáil as a Provisional Government”.

Concerning the IRA’s claim to be the legitimate Government of the Irish Republic, volunteers are inducted on the basis of accepted the following:

“This belief, this ethical fact should and must give moral strength to all volunteers and all members of every Branch of the Republican Movement. The IRA, its leadership, is the lawful Government of the Irish Republic, all other parliaments or assemblies claiming the right to speak for and to pass laws on behalf of the Irish people are illegal assemblies, puppet governments of a foreign power, and willing tools of occupying forces.

Volunteers must firmly believe without doubt and without reservation that as members of the IRA all orders issued by the Army Authority and all actions directed by the Army Authority are the legal orders and lawful actions of the Government of the Irish Republic. This is one of the important mainstays of the Republican Movement, the firm belief that all operations and actions directed by the Army are, in effect, the lawful acts and legal actions of the Government of all the Irish people.”

While the Provisionals have tactically relaxed their previous ban on seeking election to parliaments and assemblies, the fundamental position of the Provisionals – including, of course, Sinn Fein - still remains that the lawful and legitimate power of government of the Irish people is vested in the IRA and not elsewhere.

That belief is the basis of the absurd Adams falsehood that Provo “volunteers” commit no crime. Everything they do on instructions is, by definition, lawful. That is why nothing they do can be condemned. That is why no Provo politician will ask or suggest that any person should report any knowledge of the Northern Bank raid or any other outrage to the PSNI or the Garda Siochana. Caoimhghin O’ Caolain couldn’t even advise persons with information on the Omagh atrocity to assist the police when asked to do so on radio.

Where to Now?
The real issue that must now be addressed is the absolute necessity to bring paramilitarism to a decisive, unambiguous and irreversible end. There is little reality in thinking that the IRA will “go back to war”. Since the atrocities at the Twin Towers and Madrid, it is abundantly clear that the Provisionals as a movement would face immediate and radical suppression if they were to seriously attempt such a course. A second Canary Wharf would blow the entire Provisional movement itself to smithereens. And they know that.

The people of both parts of this island must stand up to the deceptions, deceits, propaganda, and stratagems of the Provisional movement. There is no room for the Army Council in Ireland’s future. There is no room in democratic representative institutions, North or South, for those who do the bidding of the Army Council and who cannot or will not operate independently of it. There is no way forward – North or South – for politicians with an agenda based on the existence, legitimacy, or continuity of the IRA.

Those of us who are genuinely Republican – who know the meaning of the term – must stand by the Republic which our grandparents, parents and we have created and serve– not the monster of the Provisionals’ ideology.
A liberal, successful, self-confident, generous and caring Irish society does not need the political insights of Havana or of FARC or of ETA – all of which have been the object of Provo ideological kerb-crawling. These are not models for Ireland, even for the creation of a so-called socialist republic.

As for the Provisional leadership, the moment of truth has arrived and in the starkest manner imaginable. Far from architects and drivers of a peace process, they are seen to be insatiable slaves of a divisve, discredited and destructive ideology. They are more in the mode of Mugabe than Mandela.

They are not republican. They are not committed to human rights or to civil or political liberties. They have betrayed the tri-colour and the reconciliation that it symbolises. They have hi-jacked History. They have put a gun to the head of Hope.

Instead, the Provos have by their actions opened up a gulf of mistrust. They have successfully polarised Northern politics at the expense of those who are reconcilers in the centre ground.

The true republican imperative of reconciling orange and green has been set back for decades by their actions. The door into exclusively democratic and peaceful politics is open for them and will remain open. But it is not a threshold which can be straddled or camped on by those who want to put one foot into democracy while leaving the other foot planted in terrorism.

Our freedoms, our democracy and our future all depend on that proposition. We must stand by the one and only republic that we have – the state that was built by the generation that won us our freedom and that has been sustained since by democracy and the rule of law. There is but one army entitled to be considered Oglaigh na h-Eireann – the Defence Forces maintained by the Oireachtas under Bunreacht na h-Eireann.