Sinn Fein and the (not so) Dissident IRA - They haven't gone away you know.

Sinn Fein & The Not so Dissidents.

Q) What do the names Corry, Duffy, McKenna, Price, McKevitt, Sands-McKevitt have in common?
A) All were leading PIRA activists and all are now leading “dissidents”. They really never went away you know.

Don’t be fooled into believing that the vast majority of “dissidents” are fresh faced youths, with no PIRA pasts. These thugs are PIRA veterans carrying on the violence under a different name. Same people, same weapons, same tactics, same strongholds. The only thing thats changed is the letter P from the front of IRA. Now it’s R, or C or even N.

Publicly SF may distance themselves from these so-called dissidents, but they always stop short of condemning them or their activities. In fact, the same SF leaders who publicly dismiss the terrorists, privately lobby on behalf of their members.

Martin McGuinness admitted at SF conference that he had met the Parole Commissioners calling for the release of dissident prisoners including Marian Price and Martin Corry.

In a poll of SF activists only 12% thought the dissidents were traitors.

More and more often PIRA weapons and explosives are turning up in the hands of the dissidents? Are they stolen? If so, from where? Weren’t they all decommissioned? If stolen then that is a crime punishable by death. Yet no-one is being punished by PIRA.

The fact that anti-agreement republicans, with stolen Provo arms are able to act with freedom in SF/IRA strongholds is solely because SF/IRA allows them to. Yet if republican history shows us one thing, it's that they aren't big on allowing anyone or anything to survive that they don't want to survive. No, these dissidents are being encouraged.

In fact it’s been republican policy since the 1980’s, when on the back of the Hunger Strikes and Sinn Fein’s early electoral success, the republican movement adopted the armalite and ballot box policy as espoused by Danny Morrison:

“Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?”

This strategy was never abandoned. However it had to be adapted in light of the Mitchell Principles and Belfast Agreement.

SF/IRA didn’t take power in Ireland when they signed the Belfast Agreement. But at that point they had to be seen to be using only democratic means. However SF/IRA already had been working on this for years. They got away with it so well that it even got it’s own name:

No Claim.. No Blame.

During the IRA ceasefires of the 1990's (when Blair's government was determined to keep SF in talks at all costs) and even for years after the Belfast Agreement was signed, PIRA continued to maim and murder. However they did so under cover names such as DAAD. However when DAAD was exposed as PIRA did they stop the killings? No, they simply stopped claiming their violence altogether.

What happened then was a huge success for SF/IRA. If PIRA members were connected to crimes, SF either denied it or if that wasn’t possible they would just deny the violence had been sanctioned by the IRA leadership. “The IRA leadership didn’t claim it, so it wasn’t an IRA killing". Notable examples include the murders of Paul Quinn & Robert McCartney.

Thanks in part to the lack of any pressure from the press, governments or security agencies, the “No claim, no blame” policy worked better than republicans could ever have hoped. Not that murdering ever shamed Sinn Fein/IRA but it did make for some awkward fund raisers for Messrs Adams and co. (see McCartney murder)

The dissidents need Sinn Fein and Sinn Fein need them. With their private murder gang at hand, republicans can again use violence and the threat of violence to apply pressure as and when it's needed without ever being blamed.

Not convinced? Just look at the upsurge in IRA activity preceding and during the Haas negotiations.