They won’t go away, we know

AS IF to crown the tumult of the month, on March 30, 2009 there were more than a dozen hijackings in Belfast by dissident republicans bringing the city to a standstill. If you were in the city that day it was a worrying place to be, with reports of a man being doused in petrol and multiple hoax bomb alerts across the city.

As so often the seriousness of the activity was deliberately downplayed by the news media to draw publicity away. Trouble began in the Ardoyne, north Belfast, at 3PM when two men entered the home of an elderly lady and seized the keys to a lorry which they crashed into the gates of the Holy Cross Church on the Crumlin Road. Almost all hijacked vehicles were abandoned outside police stations and set on fire as a warning.

Fourteen months on, I pass through a temporary roadblock in the same area, one thankfully manned by security forces. The constable is extremely jumpy as well he might be: they shoot at them up here. At the top of the street is a part-time police station targeted by a recent pipe bomb attack that shook the windows of my house. Anticipated budgetary cuts will achieve what the dissidents have failed and put it out of existence. It may well be that moving out represents the best form of staying alive. Recently former Provisional IRA personnel announced the organization had lost control of the Ardoyne area.

In prosperous times affluence nullifies disenchantment, but the economic downturn has unquestionably boosted the capacity of the dissidents to recruit from what the loyalist Billy Mitchell once termed ‘the working class, the workless class, and the underclass’, in particular among the young in deprived areas.

An 18 year-old Catholic man from north Belfast believes most ‘don’t want to go back to it’ but that some would because ‘They are on the brew (dole). They have nothing really to do. They can’t be bothered going out to find a job or nothing, so that’s what would start them up again.’

Richard English, of Queen’s University Belfast and an expert on Irish republicanism, concurs with the importance of looking at ‘the ages involved: for a time Omagh helped kill off dissident violence. But someone aged 18 now was too young for that Omagh effect to have much impact.’

However, the activist and writer Jeff Dudgeon points out: ‘I noticed in the recent video of dissident republicans training somewhere (perhaps South Armagh) all the men depicted in the hills were masked but it was plain that all were in their thirties or older which says something about their core membership.’ This chimes with the experience of a West Belfast driver whose van was hijacked in the March 2009 offensive. He remembered that the hijackers were not youths but in their late-thirties or forties with ‘scarves and hoodies on which made me think they were jokers – then you see a firearm and realize it wasn’t a joke.’   

Dissidents toyed with running Colin Duffy in the European Parliament elections of last year but withdrew, indicating they are not fools. Such a candidate would be crushed at the polls by both nationalist and Unionist parties. By denying their involvement they are withdrawing the likelihood that they will be democratically defeated and can continue to peddle the spurious assertion that Northern Ireland’s democratic institutions have ‘no legitimacy’. In this year’s Westminster Parliamentary election they didn’t even bother to run a single candidate and are unable to out-abstention Sinn Féin. The former Chief Constable Hugh Orde dismissed their attempts ‘to gain any political foothold through elections’ when ‘they are wiped out by decent politicians committed to moving Northern Ireland forward’.

Outlining why dissident republicanism’s embers continue to burn, Anthony MacIntyre’s case is hard to refute: it is that the current ‘gains’ of the Adams-McGuinness leadership through the Belfast Agreement amount to ‘a less substantive deal’ than was secured by the constitutional nationalists and Labour men of the SDLP in 1974’s Sunningdale power-sharing Executive.

This recalls the observation of former adviser to David Trimble, (now Lord) Paul Bew that, ‘The Unionists have won—they just don’t know it yet’.

Jeff Dudgeon agrees: ‘The big argument-winner for the dissidents is asking the question what was all the dying and killing about for 40 years, if all we got was Stormont?’ On the May 6 the DUP heavyweight Gregory Campbell roared defiantly at the count of his safe East Londonderry seat, in more than a nodding reference to the Provisionals’ example, that ‘It was wrong then and it’s wrong now!’

To some extent dissident republicanism is still a nascent phenomenon and the dust hasn’t settled. Dudgeon, circumspect in the calm of a south Belfast café far removed from the other side of the city, believes: ‘Dissident banditry and criminal activity will take decades to die away. It has been periodic for centuries’.

He chillingly predicts that ‘to gain any popular support the dissidents will have to start being sectarian’ and believes, with some justification, that Sinn Féin plays its part in fuelling dissident violence—notwithstanding Martin McGuinness’s ferocious denunciation—with ‘the constant reinforcing of rage among youngsters with its incessant victimology that will create in possibly a short time a new generation of young enragés. If you talk to or rather argue with any Sinn Féin person these days they can rapidly descend into apoplexy or cold hate.’

Richard English identifies that ‘the challenge of dissident republicanism was always likely to become more pressing as the millenarian hopes of the Provos became replaced by the rather more dull and quotidian business of mature politics year by year, Martin McGuinness answering questions in parliamentary debate rather than having people try to kill those who took part in parliamentary politics.’

The latter has presided with Adams over Sinn Fein’s march into the parliaments but has not covered his flank with the republican base as effectively. Another man I meet off Loyalist Sandy Row with connections to inter-paramilitary bodies feels strongly that British security forces have their own people inside the groupings, which may account for the lack of any successful prosecution in connection with the Omagh bomb. He reveals that moves were made towards talks but that the dissidents ‘were treated in a take it or leave it way by Sinn Féin and were not accommodated’ as ‘you usually don’t dialogue when you are killing people.’

Hugh Orde spoke in November 2008 of dissident republicans recruiting ‘the next generation, the disenfranchised, the marginalised. These are people who are right on the edge of society anyway, who are vulnerable to an approach and more vulnerable when you have nothing going on in terms of the world moving on as one would hope. So I think that gives them more potential.’

A security source confirmed after the killing of two British soldiers in March 2009 that they ‘knew these killers were planning something big but the problem is that there was nothing specific—they could have stuck anywhere’.   

The violence of dissident republicanism is a black hole representing a debilitating cycle of unending conflict and dearth of dialogue. Their manoeuvres are thrashes in the dark. But the power of the dissidents lies in their powerlessness. Unlike the Provisional IRA who could be called into a negotiation room somewhere in the countryside, a group that always encompassed individuals the British government ‘could do business with’ alongside the hardliners, the dissidents are capable of anything precisely because they have so little to lose.