Daily Ireland, February 22, 2005
Editorial:
Intelligence gap
It’s not yet twelve years since Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams carried the
coffin of IRA man Thomas Begley, whose bomb took nine lives as well as his
own in October 1993. It seems for some the lessons of the past have been
very quickly forgotten – or perhaps they’re just being ignored.
When Mr Adams turned up at a republican commemoration in Strabane he was
photographed with a large number of people in paramilitary uniforms.
Inevitably, he’s been excoriated for it. But had Mr Adams not turned up, or
had he walked away, the outcome would have been considerably more damaging
than a few hostile pictures in the press.
Those republicans in Strabane who dressed in full paramilitary uniform could
just as easily have turned up in white shirts and black ties.
That they did not is a small but telling indicator of the mood of the
hardline republican rank and file – they were more interested in sending out
a defiant message than they were in making life easy for Gerry Adams.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, turned up the heat
again with his assertion that Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin
Ferris are all on the IRA Army Council, although Taoiseach Bertie Ahern
declined to go along with him on that particular one.
Mr McDowell claimed that as the Minister of Justice he has access to
particular information that other members of the government do not
necessarily have access to.
Of course the intelligence services in the Republic will have excellent
intelligence linking the senior Sinn Féin members to the IRA because those
Sinn Féin members meet the IRA on a regular basis to discuss peace process
matters.
That’s hardly a big secret, but if that intelligence is good enough to
indicate what the Sinn Féin leadership and the IRA talk about when they get
together – as Mr McDowell’s latest claim clearly implies – then it’s strange
that it wasn’t used to stop the Northern Bank raid, the money laundering and
the multiple acts of criminality that the Dublin government claims Sinn Féin
and the IRA are involved in.
It’s long been a source of wonder that intelligence on both sides of the
Border is so accurate and trustworthy when it comes to making deeply
damaging claims about groups and individuals, but so totally lacking when it
comes to stopping those groups and individuals from carrying out the
criminality that they're said to be involved in.