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By Root 1098 0

to the politics of the gun. These included the early release of paramilitary prisoners, a commission on the fate of the RUC, which after the Patten Report was refashioned as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and the sanctioning of ‘community restorative justice’ for those communities which did not trust the regular courts. This effectively handed justice over to paramilitaries who, while in jail, had reconfigured themselves into lawyers and sociologists, except those like Adair who were bent on a life of organised crime and hence concentrated on drugs and weight-lifting. PIRA spent five years prevaricating over the issue of putting its arms dumps beyond use, the face-saving formula adopted for their surrender. For a brief period, the feisty law lecturer turned statesman David Trimble emerged with the Ulster Unionist Party as the strongest grouping in the Northern Ireland Assembly. The dramatic rise in the Sinn Fein vote vis-a-vis that of the moderate SDLP resulted in a corresponding leaching of Unionist voters away from the UUP and Trimble towards the more populist Democratic Unionists of Ian Paisley. To his credit, Blair refused to be deflected from his course, even when, as in August 1998, a huge bomb planted by the breakaway Real IRA demolished the centre of Omagh, killing twenty-nine people and injuring three hundred, in the worst atrocity of the entire Troubles.

While the Provos had been militarily defeated, Sinn Fein was more adroit on the world stage than the loyalists. The latter were hopeless at presenting their case—which should better have resembled the republicans’ ‘story’—to the wider world. Their most fluent advocates tended to be Tory Roman Catholics and Dean Godson, an Orthodox Jew, writing in the British print media. Sinn Féin-PIRA had a vast propaganda and fund-raising operation in the US. Despite many Irish-Americans being descendants of Ulster Scots, integrated to the point of invisibility, the Unionists had no permanent office in a capital where one can otherwise encounter lobbyists for Burkina Faso and Fiji. It was revealing that when the loyalists got around to stressing their historic role in modernising Ulster through industry, they alighted upon the idea of christening Harland and Wolff shipyard ‘Titanic Quarter’ after the biggest shipwreck in history. There have also been attempts to rewrite ancient history in order to make the Ulster Scots rival victims to the republicans. The Iron Age inhabitants of Ulster were cruelly expelled by invading Gaels and fled to western Scotland. Their descendants returned, uncorrupted, as Ulster Scots planters in the seventeenth century. Attempts to invent or revive the language are as artificial as the efforts of nineteenth-century Catholic schoolmasters to propagate Gaelic.52 One missed opportunity was to fail to emphasise Sinn Féin-PIRA’s unsavoury affiliations with ETA, FARC and the PLO, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the advent of a US climate less indulgent towards terrorists. Where Adams was folksy, slippery and sentimental, with the tone of a sociology lecturer at a provincial university, Trimble was lawyerly and prickly. Although a more articulate loyalist leadership came to the fore, including a number of convicted terrorists who emerged from prison, in September 2001 the world was nauseated by the sight of north Belfast loyalist mobs intimidating infants who, in order to reach the Catholic Holy Cross primary school from the mainly Catholic Ardoyne estate, had to walk four hundred yards through the Protestant Glenbryn estate. This was one of several engineered disputes, designed to attract maximum bad publicity.

Every summer there were also increasingly ugly scenes as the oldest Orange lodge at Portadown asserted its right to march to a Protestant church at Drumcree, via a Catholic district whose residents’ association was riddled with republican sympathisers. At these parades cum riots leading Unionist politicians found themselves in the unsavoury company of loyalist paramilitaries bent on using an armoured mechanical digger to attack the RUC.53