IF YOU'RE ever in Cork and fancy a break from the city's marvellous bars, then it's not far to the village of Béal na mBláth. There, on a tight bend in the narrow road that heads south to Bandon, the Irish nationalist Michael Collins was ambushed and
shot dead on August 22, 1922. Apart from a commemorative stone cross, the scene is much the same as it was when the Free State leader's convoy came under fire from Republicans who opposed his treaty with the British. It's not hard to imagine the riflemen lying in wait behind the steep banks that line the road. Collins was the only casualty, killed by a dum-dum bullet to the head fired by a marksman who had received his training – irony of ironies – in the British Army.
The shadow of Collins fell again on Ireland last week. Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander turned government minister, surely felt it fall when he used a deliberately emotive word to describe the dissident Republicans who had murdered two soldiers and a policeman. The killers, he said, were "traitors to the island of Ireland".
No word in Irish history is more loaded. Collins was called a traitor for supposedly selling out a 32-county Irish republic. His opponents in the anti-treaty IRA were themselves called traitors because they defied the will of the Irish people as expressed in the Dáil. (McGuinness last week echoed this rationale by saying the killers in the Continuity IRA and Real IRA had "betrayed the desires and political aspirations of all the people who live on this island".)
In the eight days since the cold-blooded murders at Masserene Barracks, there have been fears the peace process could now unravel. A grim campaign of one-upmanship is possible as dissident Republican groups vie for bloody supremacy as killers of soldiers and police officers. More worryingly, there's the prospect of revenge attacks from Protestant paramilitaries and the familiar descent onto a spiral of tit-for-tat sectarian reprisals. As always, a terrorist's most fervent hope is an overreaction from his most hated enemy.
So far the reaction from Loyalist groups across the political spectrum – including the UDA and UVF – has been encouraging. They correctly identify this as a trap. That discipline may not hold and the Loyalists' very own dissident groups may still decide to take matters into their own hands. It remains a worrying fact that while the mainstream Republican terror groups have undergone a disarmament process overseen by international military observers, Loyalist paramilitaries remain armed.
Yet perhaps a more worrying prospect is internecine violence within the nationalist community itself. A truly catastrophic development would be 21st-century bloodshed that echoed the battles of the Irish Civil War. The enmities between Catholic and Protestant in Ulster run deep. But in many hearts the enmities of the Civil War run deeper and longer. Maybe the reprisals we should fear the most this weekend are not from the UDA or the UVF, but from the old hands of the Provisional IRA. After all, what were last week's killings if not a direct challenge to the moral authority of the PIRA/Sinn Fein hierarchy, and their Collins-esque deal with the hated Brits? The three dead bodies in uniform were simply the means of delivering the message.
The Continuity IRA and the Real IRA have proved they are capable of callous murder. Yet they are a few fundamentalist die-hards – many of them ensconced in the south – and their troops are mostly undisciplined youths looking for a buzz. The footsoldiers lack the discipline, training and operational paramilitary experience of the men and women who have put aside violence and are now firmly part of the Northern Ireland establishment. If the dissidents turned their guns on the ideological children of Michael Collins, the consequences would be bloody and intractable. Talk of traitors and betrayal – a landmark moment in Northern Irish history when uttered by someone such as McGuinness – ups the stakes considerably.
Much now rests on the ability of the Police Service of Northern Ireland to suppress the dissident threat. And there's the rub, because when the old Royal Ulster Constabulary was ditched to make way for the new force, also ditched was much of the old regime's intelligence-gathering capabilities. The new wave of Republican violence is a de facto sign that MI5 is not yet a thoroughly effective substitute for the discredited RUC Special Branch. Britain's spooks are, after all, rather busy trying to head off jihadist mass murder.
If the new-look security forces prove unable to quell the dissident Republican challenge, others may be tempted to step in. The danger is that former Provos who took some persuading to get on board the peace process take the matter into their own hands. The result would split the nationalist community, destroy the fragile political truce on which peace depends and plunge Ulster back into violent turmoil.
In a Dáil debate on the Anglo-Irish treaty in December 1921, Michael Collins said: "Deputies have spoken about whether dead men would approve of it, and they have spoken about whether children yet unborn would approve it, but few have spoken of whether the living approve it."
There is no doubt whatsoever that the people of Ireland, north and south of the border, want to see the peace process nourished, and the remarkable – albeit fragile – political alliances sustained. The living approve, even if a minority continue to insist on pursuing dead men's dreams. If Ireland, of all places, cannot learn from its history, who on earth can?
