Posted by BOOK ON SCAPPATICCI IS DEPRESSING ACCOUNT OF A LOST WAR
I would disagree with Gerry Adams on most things pertaining to where Irish nationalism now finds itself.
However, if he was aware of even an inkling of the horror and treachery that is detailed in Richard O’Rawe’s Stakeknife’s Dirty War, and of course he was, then if he never did anything else in his life, ending the “war” will stand to his eternal credit.
The book begins with accounts of the onslaught by loyalists and by the unionist state police and the British army on Catholics in Belfast in 1969.
They were fully justified in defending themselves against that onslaught. The Provisional IRA was also perhaps justified in believing that for several years it might have been able to force the British into completing their military and administrative withdrawal from Ireland suspended in 1921.
That was no longer likely from the ending of the first IRA ceasefire in 1972. After that the whole thing descended into the horrors described in the book. We already know much about the British state complicity in the loyalist terror unleashed against the Catholic population. The primary victims in what O’Rawe details were also Catholics, mostly members of the IRA, and the British intelligence forces were also complicit in that.
However, to solely blame them for the fact that British agent Freddie Scappaticci, a psychopathic torturer and serial killer, was allowed to play such a prominent role in the Provos is to avoid several home truths. Nor does O’Rawe take that view himself. The very nature and structure of the IRA or any other conspiratorial organisation means that not only is internal corruption and infiltration almost inevitable, but is almost guaranteed.
If there is one emotion that lingers after putting the book down, it is of sadness at the sheer waste of life that it documents. Not just the lives of those who were victims of a sordid criminal conspiracy that involved both the IRA and the British intelligence forces, but of everyone involved and everyone touched by what was ultimately three decades of futility.
The current Sinn Féin line that it was all about someone from a Catholic nationalist background becoming the first administrator in the British controlled part of Ireland is so pathetic it is undeserving of a response. Lots of Irish Catholics have served a similar function over the centuries.
The book also reminded me personally of why at an early stage in my four and a half years as a republican prisoner I came to the conclusion that I would never again surrender my personal autonomy to those who were the leaders of the IRA. Had I been more consistent I would not have persisted for years after that in believing that something might after all be retrieved from the mess, even after the surrender.
As O’Rawe and others recognise, that while the end was welcome, to pitch the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement and all that ensued as representing anything remotely like a victory for what the Provos were about is delusional.
Only idiots and the beneficiaries of the surrender – many of them who would never have dreamt of joining the republican movement prior to it becoming a credible career path – believe in the “undefeated army.”. There are many of them in offices in Leinster House and elsewhere.
As O’Rawe himself, who was in the H Blocks and who has also written about the duplicity of the IRA leadership during the hunger strikes – states: “All knew the IRA did not win the war and nothing illustrated this more than a British government announcement, in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire declaration, that they had no intention of issuing a declaration to withdraw from Ireland, regardless of the IRA ceasefire..”
That was almost 30 years ago. Now, the promise on which the ceasefire was sold – of a British withdrawal within a short period – has been replaced by a desperate whinge to be allowed to become the chief bottle washer for Whitehall in running Northern Ireland. That is leavened by the cynical snake oil of a border poll that is either not going to happen any time soon, or if it does will pretty overwhelmingly opt to keep the six counties under British rule. Which was the whole point of republican strategy, armed or unarmed, towards engagement with the northern state after 1922.
Back to Scap. In parts it reads like a Brett Easton Ellis novel. It would be nice to believe that Scap was unique. Anyone who spent any time in the IRA met other obvious and less obvious scum and traitors. Many of us ended up in prison because of them. We were fortunate. Others ended up like Paddy McDade being tortured in a shed in Roscommon for days by men and facilitated by other men some of whom are still regarded as heroes. Blaming Scap on it all is too convenient.
The lesson for Irish nationalists is that the idea that some small group of men have been bestowed with an Apostolic wisdom that gives them the right over the life and death of anyone including their comrades is a dangerous lie, and always has been.
There has never been a time as far back to the United Irishmen and at every stage between when the Army Council or whatever its United Irish or Fenian equivalent, was not infiltrated if not actually controlled by the British intelligence services or Garda Special Branch. Or if not by agents, by men who mostly had no qualification to be in that position anyway.
And that is not to take account of those “leaders” who when pinched over some personal “indiscretion” including rape, stealing army funds and god knows turned abjectly into agents of the state rather than be exposed. Some of them like the scumbag from the Markets in Belfast who were then allowed to continue to order the torture and murder of unfortunate men and women and children caught up in the madness.
No more. The Irish republican version of Leninism has been as poisonous and destructive on a lesser scale, and most of all self-destructive, as its communist equivalent. The response to that is certainly not to attempt to recreate it. Anyone who is remotely persuaded that some new cleansed version of the Provos might succeed where the real one failed is living under a delusion. Such attempts have already been exposed for their incompetence, not to mention penetration by multiple state agencies.
More detail of the career of Freddie Scappaticci will emerge over the next while when the Kenova inquiry issues its report that was supposed to have been published earlier this year. In the meantime, O’Rawe’s book stands as a harrowing and frankly depressing insight into the whole thing from a republican perspective.
T
POSTED IN IRISH NEWS
TAGGED WITH GERRY ADAMS, RICHARD O’RAWE, SCAPPATICCI, STAKEKNIFE’S DIRTY WAR
Dr Matt Treacy MORE BY THIS AUTHOR
CONTRIBUTOR
Author and Commentator. Matt has published a number of books including histories of the republican movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. He is currently working on a number of other books; his latest one is a novel entitled Houses of Pain. It is based on real events in the Dublin underworld. Houses of Pain is published by MTP and is currently available on line as paperback and kindle while book shops remain closed.
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