Liam Mac Uaid, West Ham CLP, argues that there are a few weeks respite for a Time to Think Campaign.
Sinn Fein has been temporarily excluded from the talks process. The IRA killed two men and this was viewed as a breach of its ceasefire. One of the men, Brendan Campbell, was a drug dealer who seems to have believed that real life was just like Al Pacino's film Scarface. He had thrown a hand grenade and fired shots at Sinn Fein premises in Belfast. The other, Robert Dougan, had been the driving force behind a two year petrol bombing campaign on a Catholic enclave in Belfast. This was in the context of a loyalist murder frenzy which left nine Catholics dead and twenty four injured in a ten day period. It is accepted that every loyalist terrorist organisation participated in the murders.
The grounds for Sinn Fein's exclusion are that the party is connected with the IRA and that the movement is now in breach of the Mitchell principles which oblige all the parties in the talks to commit themselves to exclusively peaceful means. Setting aside the British Government's lust for Iraqi blood and the fact that it has not renounced violence as a political instrument in Ireland (or anywhere else) virtually every other participant in the talks has breached the Mitchell principles.
Those loyalist parties whose gunmen have murdered Catholics and not publicly claimed responsibility are allowed to remain. This despite the fact that RUC officers privately acknowledge their role. Members of the Official Unionist Party have participated in the mass intimidation of Catholic areas through which the Orange Order wants to march. In fact the Alliance Party formally indicted David Trimble's unionists after last year's events at Dumcree but the SDLP and the two governments wanted to keep them in the talks. The point of all this is that the Mitchell principles are applied differently when the violence is directed at nationalists by loyalists.
It seems that the Republicans miscalculated what they would be allowed to get away with. It appears that they wanted to remind their own supporters and the other parties in the talks that they retain their capacity for armed action. They also wanted to warn the loyalist terrorists that they could not murder with impunity. By not claiming responsibility and not targeting police or army personnel they would have hoped to meet these objectives without compromising the party's position in the talks. Everyone makes mistakes.
A possibility suggested by loyalists is that the Republicans are seeking to engineer their permanent exclusion from the talks. This seems very unlikely. The whole thrust of Sinn Fein's politics for most of the last ten years has been towards negotiation, discussion and making the party respectable. Unless a dramatic return to the old, failed forms of struggle is what motivated the recent attacks we have to take seriously Sinn Fein's claims that it wants to be in the talks.
Just what the Adams leadership hopes to get from the talks' process is another question. Unionism won a major political victory in January when the Heads of Agreement document was released. This means that the most nationalists can expect from the talks is a cross border talking shop whose decisions have to be approved by an elected assembly in the North. This is another Stormont with complete unionist control. It is simply impossible to present such a charade as a stepping stone to a united Ireland or as any kind of progress on the national question. It is a unionist victory facilitated by the British Government. To participate in the talks is to give political validity to the new settlement.
The peace is popular, and, with the exception of some sections of the republican movement, no one wants a return to an armed struggle which has failed in its aim of forcing the British out of Ireland. But it is clear that the talks strategy is also going to fail to achieve Republicanism's principal demand. The period of exclusion from the talks should give anti-imperialists in Ireland an opportunity to review what has gone wrong and why.
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