Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

Blessed are the peacemakers?

It is hard to better Christopher Hitchens's account of the DUP/Sinn Fein deal:

I suppose I can understand why people are glad when they see Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting down together and consenting to "power sharing" in Northern Ireland — and just in time for Good Friday, too, as if to consecrate a Protestant-Catholic brotherhood just on the verge of the various feasts of the resurrection. But the phony photo-op still made me want to spew.

There will be no return to life for the thousands of people who were murdered in these men's quarrel, and it seems indecent to me that we should be thanking them for their mercy in calling off the bloodshed, let alone calling it off on condition that they alone are declared the winners.

or his view of the two main protagonists:

Both have been photographed carrying coffins at political funerals — funerals that were at one time the main cultural activity in each of their "communities." One day, their private role in filling those coffins will be fully exposed. In the meantime, they are the recognised and designated peacemakers. If you can bring yourself to applaud this, you are a masochist clapping a well-matched pair of sadists.

So what about those RUC officers then?

So a report says that the RUC collaborated with Unionist paramilitaries and allowed informers to get away with murder. What is the correct response to this news?

Here is the Prime Minister's official spokesman:

This is a deeply disturbing report about events which were totally wrong and should never have happened

Fair enough. But here's mine.

If the IRA were merely involved in criminal activity then the police should have adhered to the highest standards of behaviour. Any transgression against the law should be punished and punished particularly harshly because it was committed by the forces of law and order.

And my view has always was that the IRA should be treated as simply criminals. But you know what? My view lost.

The view that prevailed was that the IRA were political activists engaged in a war. They used any means they could to advance their cause and the police used any means they had at their disposal to stop them. The IRA thought they were in a war, and some police officers took them at their word and acted as if it was a war, with all the dirty things that go on in wars.

Why do I say that this view prevailed? Well, what other construction can one put on the release of dozens of murderers from jail and the bestowing of ministerial office on the IRA's leadership, all in exchange for a ceasefire.

We bought the cessation (or at least partial cessation) of IRA violence at a huge moral price - our willingness to treat common murder as an act of war, and readiness to excuse the murderers.

And given that we have done this, we cannot now turn round to the police officers and treat them as if they were involved in an ordinary law and order situation. It would be offensive to punish the police officers, ruin their lives, while letting Gerry Adams swan up Downing Street.

I wish it were different but, de facto if not de jure, we've accepted the "war" version of events and there's no going back.