An inability to learn from the past

I HAVE always admired Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for their success and patience in bringing the IRA with them on the democratic road to peace. Now I am beginning to wonder.
They were never, of course, going to be able to convince all the IRA to give up their bombs and their guns. But I did believe that after 30 years of hardship and suffering, killing and dying, that only a tiny minority of Republicans would want to continue the struggle when peace and power-sharing were within their grasp.
But a tiny minority can do a lot of damage as we saw in Belfast and Armagh in recent weeks. And Adams and McGuinness are powerless in the face of violence from dissident Republicans.
They can plead with them and appeal to them to stop wasting their own lives as well as the lives of their neighbours and their friends.
But it is all to no avail. Some people will never learn.
It took Adams and McGuinness themselves a long time to learn that the struggle was going nowhere. And that was despite all the appeals to them from popular nationalist leaders such as John Hume and Tomás Ó Fiaich.
But it was only because of British atrocities such as internment, Bloody Sunday and the deaths from the hunger strikes that the campaign of violence lasted for as long as it did.
There was little support for armed resistance when the fight began. But internment coupled with dawn raids on nationalist homes in Belfast drove scores of young Catholics into the arms of the IRA. And recruiting was later boosted by Bloody Sunday in 1972 and by the refusal of Margaret Thatcher to negotiate a compromise with the hunger strikers in the early 1980s.
The people of Northern Ireland have suffered enough. And the people of Ireland as a whole voted overwhelmingly for the Good Friday Agreement.
However, those in the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA and the so-called Óglaigh na hÉireann faction are not democrats. The fact that the vast majority of the Irish people, north and south, are totally opposed to them makes no difference to them. 
They wouldn’t even claim to be democrats. Some of them might think of themselves as revolutionaries. But revolutionaries, as far as I know, would want to improve the lives of their people. “You have nothing to lose but your chains,” the revolutionary says to his people. 
But the people of Northern Ireland are not in chains. And they have everything to lose by supporting any of the dissident groups who want to turn the clock back to the terrible years of the 1970s and the 1980s on the streets of Belfast.
“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Those were the words of Patrick Pearse at the grave of Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa before the Easter Rising. And they have come back to haunt us ever since.
Those words spurred generations of young Irishmen from Kevin Barry to Charlie Kerins and from Bobby Sands to the most youthful member of the Continuity IRA today to give their lives to the cause of Irish freedom.
Those young men think that Ireland is still unfree. Whereas the reality is that there is far more freedom for young people in Ireland today than there ever was. And despite the recession, I think they have more money to enjoy that freedom than their fathers or mothers ever had.
But, by the way, I don’t think those kids who threw petrol bombs, bricks and other missiles at loyalist marchers and at police during recent weeks in Belfast care too much about a united Ireland.  They were there for the “fun” and excitement. They texted their pals to come and join them. The peace process means nothing to them; they are as alienated as their fathers and grandfathers were before them.
But for those in the ranks of the various offshoots from the IRA, this is a more serious business. Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of Britain from Ireland will satisfy them.
They believe that because Britain maintains a garrison in Northern Ireland that Ireland is not free. They don’t want anything less than a full 32-county Irish Republic.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with that aspiration. But there is everything wrong with the way they are going about it. And they haven’t a hope in the world of bringing it about.
Could they really believe that detonating a bomb in south Armagh or shooting a young PSNI officer in any part of the north is going to bring about a united Ireland?
They want an extreme backlash from the British such as internment or another Bloody Sunday but all they are going to get is another Omagh, Enniskillen or Claudy. British atrocities are not going to be repeated. The dissidents are not going to be given the opportunity of having their ranks swollen by more British stupidity.
David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher. Nick Clegg is no Reginald Maudling.
The tragedy is that while Britain seems to have learned from the mistakes of the past, the IRA splinter groups have learned nothing.
And because of that, I believe little can be gained from talking to them.