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The IRA Regrets...
by Kevin Connolly
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In Northern Ireland the past is a dark and divided place; when our politicians pay it a visit, it is generally to dust off a past grievance to justify some future act of intransigence.
In their schools, in their songs and on their streets, protestants and catholics are offered versions of history so different that at the extremes they produce different senses of right and wrong.
Republicans are brought up to believe that theirs are the legitimate weapons in Northern Ireland, that they are an army of resistants fighting an occupying power.
Unionists believe 鈥渢heir鈥 police and Britain鈥檚 armed forces have bravely held the line here against a murderous terrorist rabble.
The IRA鈥檚 apology to the families of what it calls non-combatant victims of the troubles sits uncertainly, somewhere in between those two understandings of history.
Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein urges us to take it at face value, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble points out that the IRA statement offers no guarantees about the future.
These statements are often written in a curiously pompous style, shot through with the jargon of military planners or political science lecturers.
But the IRA鈥檚 distinction between it鈥檚 civilian and military victims is a reminder that the organisation is speaking to two very different audiences.
It is of course trying to reach out to its victims, but it is also sending a signal to it鈥檚 own grass-roots that it continues to believe it was justified in killing anyone who wore a British uniform. It can鈥檛 abandon that belief without undermining it鈥檚 followers belief in the legitimacy of everything they鈥檝e done in the last 30 years.
The timing too is opportunistic. Here is the IRA reminding us how far they have travelled since the no warning bombs of Bloody Friday, just as the British government prepares to draw up a stricter definition of just what really constitutes a paramilitary ceasefire.
No reason in that though to doubt the underlying sincerity. After all if the IRA can look back with regret, that鈥檚 one more reason for the rest of us to look forward with hope.
LINKS
- from 91热爆 News Online
official website
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