Andersontown News, 4. October 2001, http://www.irelandclick.com/
Editorial "we say"
Hypocrisy grows by the day
There’s an Alice-in-Wonderland feel to the current political scenario, and it
seems that with each passing day things grow more bleakly surreal.
Consider if you will the spectacle of the PUP’s David Ervine and Billy
Hutchinson giving David Trimble the requisite number of signatures needed to
allow his motion to exclude Sinn Fein to be heard in the assembly. It’s hard
to know just who in this shameful and grubby episode comes out with the least
credit.
Let us first of all remind ourselves that Messrs Ervine and Hutchinson are
members of a party with direct links to the UVF. This is the same UVF which just
a month ago tried to napalm daytrippers in Ballycastle during the Lammas Fair.
And yet both stand up, and with perfectly straight faces, claim that Sinn Fein
isn’t fit to govern because it hasn’t proved its commitment to non-violence
in word or deed. It’s difficult to know whether to retch or guffaw in response
to hypocrisy of such mind-boggling magnitude. Add to that the fact that Mr
Ervine in the past has said that the UVF will not necessarily disarm even if the
IRA does, and you find yourself starting to think that maybe the Mad Hatter’s
tea party wasn’t that strange after all.
And what of Mr Trimble, that fearless opposer of paramilitarism in all its
manifestations? Is he in the least bit discomfited by the fact that his motion
to exclude Sinn Fein is to be heard because he won the support of the political
wing of the UVF? No more discomfited than he was by seeing the PUP’s Hugh
Smyth take the UUP whip on Belfast City Council; no more discomfited than he was
when members of his party left Stormont to travel to City Hall to vote for the
UDP’s Frank McCoubrey as Deputy Lord Mayor in the middle of a blood-soaked
loyalist feud; no more discomfited than he was when he sat down with UVF and UDA
goons in May 1974 to plot the downfall of a government; no more discomfited than
when he originally walked through the gates of Stormont with the UDP and the PUP
at his shoulder.
And just when you thought that things simply couldn’t get any curiouser and
curiouser, up pops British Secretary of State John Reid to tell us why it was
that he wasn’t going to declare the UDA ceasefire over. If we have heard him
right (and he will surely let us know if we have not), he believes the UDA had
been involved in widespread and orchestrated violence – ie, that they have
indeed broken their ceasefire. But, acting on advice (not UDA advice, we’re
now told), he believed that the UDA was going to stop misbehaving and therefore
he was giving them a second chance. In a nutshell, then, here is the John Reid
plan for peace in our time: paramilitaries who shoot and bomb and murder and
maim shall not be deemed to have broken their ceasefires as long as they agree
to stop for a bit.
In response to this priceless piece of political jiggery-pokery, all
paramilitary groups may now presumably feel entitled to the same consideration.
Should the IRA decide to launch a few mortars at Woodbourne Barracks, no censure
will ensue so long as they promise not to do it again. Of course, we all know
This is nonsense. If the IRA was engaged in even a fraction of the violence that
loyalists have been engaged in, then Sinn Fein’s feet wouldn’t touch the
ground. There would be such a deafening outpouring of disapproval from unionists
and the Irish and British media that Mr Reid would be forced to act. The only
reason that the Secretary of State feels able to indulge in such fancy footwork
a propos the loyalist paramilitaries is that he knows the response will be
relatively muted. The Ardoyne debacle is allowed to continue because there is no
pressure on the authorities to act – it is only nationalists, after all, who
are getting it in the neck. No trade unions walk with the parents and children
to school – it is left to the new Tory shadow Secretary of State, of all
people, to embarrass the comrades on that score. The familiar peace train faces
are nowhere to be seen as the bombs explode nightly and teenagers and schoolboys
are gunned to death. No doves of peace are released to mark the murder of Martin
O’Hagan, no tens of thousands hold lit candles aloft at City Hall.
All of this we have seen so many times before; in its glaring absence now, it
can be seen for the sickening and cynical hypocrisy that it was.