“IN order to prevent the slaughter of innocent people and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers, the members of the Provisional Government agree to an unconditional surrender and order the laying down of arms and a call to disband.” Signed by Patrick Pearse.
That message took decades to sink in as successive generations of militant republicans struggled to end the violence and murder of innocent people.
Last week in Lurgan, it was clear that some still don’t get it as dissident republicans hijacked a vehicle at gunpoint and threatened to kill the driver if he did not bring it, now carrying a viable device, to a local police station.
A horrific and frightening experience for an innocent man caused by the moronic and twisted thought processes of zealots only too ready to risk his life for their forlorn cause.
It would also have been a traumatic memory trigger for Kathleen Gillespie, who was cruelly widowed by the IRA 35 years ago when her husband was chained into a bomb-loaded van and made to drive it to an army checkpoint where it exploded, killing him and five soldiers.
Dissident republicans aren’t part of the past. They are in the here and now, although deluded and dangerous.
As can be seen by their tactics, they don’t lick their barbarous practices off the ground.
Condemnation alone will not end their attempts to pull down Northern Ireland’s fragile peace. They need to be outcast and rejected by those around them.
This isn’t easy, as witnessed by the iron-clad grip loyalist paramilitaries often exercise within their own working-class communities.
Law and order has a major role to play.
Working-class communities need the police to be visible in areas where paramilitaries lurk and leech off the people. Policing needs to be robust.
The criminal justice system, and in particular the courts, need to take a zero-tolerance approach.
Too often, incompetence by the PSNI or prosecution service has resulted in paramilitaries running rings around them in the courts, no doubt to the frustration of judges.
When far-right activists went on the rampage in Britain, justice was swift, brutal, and seen to be done.
Despite the whinging of a few, the general public was glad to see them off the street.
There’s no appetite in the general public for a widespread return to violence.
But remember too, there was no broad popular support for loyalist or republican paramilitaries during the Troubles.
Things can escalate quickly here when mainstream parties continually wage cultural wars and play dog-whistling, partisan politics.
Or when the keyboard marionettes within republicanism and loyalism push to agitate and bait, stirring the sectarian pot until it boils over.
Violence has no part in Ireland’s future, north or south.
In the Republic, there is still an unarmed police service and defence forces with a distinguished and internationally-recognised record in peacekeeping.
In truth, no country should have a war department unless it’s in an emergency situation.
The increasingly unhinged and deluded current incumbent of the White House is war-obsessed – and I don’t mean in stopping them.
If he isn’t limited in the exercise of his executive powers by the November mid-term elections or Supreme Court, America for the next three years will become as much a rogue and pariah state as Israel, North Korea, and Russia.
China looks positively benevolent these days compared to the USA.
To watch the equally deranged-sounding ‘War Secretary’, Pete Hegseth, invoke God in waging violence was stomach-churning.
At least Pope Leo had his measure with his homily on Palm Sunday: “This is our God, a God who refuses war, who does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”
It’s hard to believe that three key members of the Trump administration – JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt – are all Catholics. I would hate to be behind them at the confessional.
Vance has already managed a rather unique achievement for being corrected by two popes.
Leavitt (or as I prefer, ‘Leave-it’, given her stonewall performances) is so beyond reality she could give Joseph Goebbels a run for his money.
The carpet bombing of Iran is a war crime of epic proportions. Along with genocide in Gaza, the Trump and Netanyahu governments are now neck-deep in the blood of innocent civilians.
By crippling the global economy in the wake of their unwarranted violence, they are intent on laying waste to some of the poorest nations of the world who can’t afford rocketing fuel prices.
Two famous American generals from different eras (one later a President) came to roughly the same conclusions about war.
The legendary General Sherman of the American Civil War wrote: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It’s only those who never fired a shot or heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for destruction.”
Eisenhower, nearly a century later, added: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can – only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. It is a deadly harvest.”
Whether it’s the deluded plastic patriots in balaclavas or the suited adolescents playing at war games in the White House, they both share an eagerness to let others die for their follies.
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