Murder And The First Minister

For Sinn Fein's Republican News 'book of the year' is undoubtedly The Committee which is unavailable in all good bookshops, or indeed any bookshops in Britain and Ireland, mired as it is in legal battles.
This a result of exposing the complicity of leading politicians, businessmen, and the RUC with the running and control of the loyalist death squads. Collusion between death squads and the RUC; death squads and the British Army and between death squads and M15 is well documented. Equally, few would deny that leading Unionist politicians have always enjoyed 'a nod and a wink' relationship with loyalist paramilitarism. What The Committee purports to show is both the scale and hands on role few suspected. We use the word 'purport' advisedly, for like RN, we 'do not claim all the assertions of author McPhilemy's main informant are correct'. Not all of them have to be. A mere percentage are enough to prove that mainstream Unionism is, in essence, reactionary, corrupt and irredeemably anti-democratic. The insight into the Unionist mindset, provided by the book gives lie to the notion that the crucial contributions to the peace process as reflected in the Nobel Prize awards, were from moderate unionism and constitutional nationalism. As with the war, the cutting edge and impetus for negotiations lie elsewhere; first and foremost with Irish republicanism, thereafter with the British establishment. And if the British establishment wants to painlessly extract itself from Ireland as the evidence indicates, then mainstream Unionism must be faced down. Sunday Times editorials which routinely proclaim 'that those who want peace must remove it [Republicanism] from the equation' know that every conceivable variation of that formula applied against republicanism has failed. The only real option left as the Sunday Times peace lovers are aware, is to invert it, and do something that British policy have singularly avoided ever since the Curragh mutiny in 1912, which is to apply the formula to Unionism instead.

Reproduced from RA vol 3, Issue 5, Feb/Mar '99