Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness Step Down As Provo IRA Leaders?So says the
man who outed them.
[Republic of Ireland Justice Minister] Mr McDowell, who broke with the London-Dublin protocol of recent years by “outing” both men as IRA leaders after the Northern Bank raid in December, said that Martin Ferris, a Sinn Fein TD, or member of the Irish Parliament, had also left the army council. He spoke as Tony Blair said that the IRA could not be compared to al-Qaeda terrorists because he did not think “the IRA would ever have set about trying to kill 3,000 people”. In 30 years about 3,600 people died in Ulster, nearly half of them killed by the Provisional IRA.I'd disagree on two counts. The IRA showed
little compunction about mass murder; it's just that their methods did not include suicide bombers/hijackers. Yes, the Birmingham Six were innocent, but somebody from the IRA blew up those pubs and killed 21 people. OTOH, blaming the IRA for half the people who died in Ulster is laying it on a little thick. Certainly some of those were killed in the pitched battles where Protestants tried to burn out the Catholic ghettos, and others were summarily executed for crimes that were handled within the Catholic community, which had (and to a certain degree still has) an instinctive distrust of the Northern Ireland police force.
Adams and McGuiness are still terrorists in my book, not fit to associate with decent people. But Tony Blair may have to deal with them as a political matter. Severe pressure of course has been on the IRA, Sinn Fein and its leaders following the tube bombings in London. Keep your eye on
Slugger and
Richard Delevan for the straight poop. Slugger has a
post here on the speculation that this announcement was coming (although he was assuming it would come from the IRA itself.
