Andersontown News, October 10, 2002 - http://www.irelandclick.com/

We say:

Stormont raid could not have been done better, Mr Orde

The raid achieved the very effect that it was meant to achieve – whether Mr Orde was in on it or not – and for that reason it was handled perfectly, writes Robin Livingstone.

Of course the PSNI knew damn well that they wouldn’t find a thing in the Sinn Féin office – the Shinners up there have been round too many corners to be caught out so easily.

That was why 40 peelers stood around playing with the peaks of their basebell caps while another twiddled his thumbs and whistled a bit before picking up the first two things to come to hand.

This wasn’t bad organisation or ineptitude – no cops are ever sent out on a job without knowing what they are supposed to be doing.

When they go to the 24-hour garage for crisps and Coke they’re well-briefed, for God’s sake.

And yet we are expected to believe that a raiding party of this size was dispatched on the most politically explosive peacetime policing action since Divis Street 1964 without any of them having the vaguest idea of what they were supposed to be doing, other than bumping into each other on the Stormont steps.

This was no Keystone Cops farce, rather it was a carefully choreographed danse macabre the implications of which could yet echo down through Irish history.

The raid on the Sinn Féin office was the blue touchpaper without which the other raids and arrests would have been a damp and sorry squib.

None of those taken into custody had a high enough profile to register more than a passing blip on the richter scale of unionist indignation.

Veteran republican Denis Donaldson was easily the best known, but before last Friday your average unionist would still have put him down as a cousin of Jeffrey.

And with unionists failing to work up even a mild harrumph about spiralling loyalist bloodshed, the arrest of a Belfast party apparatchik and the seizing of a duffle bag would have come a poor second to Paul Maskey being found guilty of fighting in a Dublin Abrekebabra.

Hugh Orde shouldn’t give up on that Stormont raid just yet, though. That Windows ‘98 disc he gave back looked like a pirate copy to me.

The ironic part about the whole thing is that events of last week proved, if anything, that republicans are more committed to peace than even their sternest detractors could have believed.

The PSNI – with the unlimited technological resources of the British state behind them – say they were involved in a lengthy investigation into the activities of the IRA.

It is alleged that the most damning papers found involved the personal details of a senior British soldier and serving prison officers.

Quite why prison officers – bottom of the food chain of British state forces – would want to target screws when they haven’t got a single prisoner in jail is not entirely clear.

And if Hugh Orde were to order the arrest and detention of the hard drive of my office computer, it would quickly and without duress give up many facts and figures considerably more alarming than any of the above.

Is this, then, finally, all that the PSNI can come up with?

If it is, then there are going to be a few unreconstructed militarists in my local who are going to be very disappointed indeed.

Former NIO director of information officer Andy Wood has been writing a column in the Irish News for some time.

This week he was required to write something about that which he knows best. This is unusual, for he normally prefers to prattle on about left-handed tin-openers and dogs moulting on the sofa.

It’s a bit like a Washington newspaper hiring Henry Kissinger to write a gardening column – and the Irish News wonders why its circulation is falling faster than the leaves in Colin Glen.

Go figure. Anyway, Andy’s latest amusing thoughts on the weather and Big Brother were put to the side this week and he wrote instead about the alleged crimes of Stormont messenger William Mackessy.

Wood wrote of the documents to which Mackessy – or any other messenger – would have had access:

“There was nothing in any of them which could truly be called ‘intelligence material’.” He added that sensitive security material is conducted on securely encrypted electronic security systems to which messengers have no access.

David Trimble claims that this is all ten times bigger than Watergate.

Ho, hum. And he further claims – with the enthusiastic, and thankfully little-read – endorsement of the Irish News that the only way out of this mess is for the IRA to disband.

A million mirthless laughs are heard the length and breadth of Ireland, because of all the demands placed on republicans thus far, it is all too obvious that this is the most preposterous and undeliverable.

Let’s say the IRA was to disband tomorrow. Does anyone really believe that the Trimbles, Donaldsons, Paisleys and Burnsides of this world wouldn’t continue to blame the IRA for every pub car park fight and every peaceline stone thrown; that the loyalists wouldn’t continue to blast away to their hearts’ content while the unionists continue to obsess about a non-existent republican threat?

Even if the IRA was to commit mass hara-kiri tomorrow, it would continue to exist in a place from which it can never extricate itself, in a place where it does most damage – in the fixed and increasingly fevered mind of unionism.