There's a scene in Sean O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock" when the "hero" of the piece, Joxer Daly, turns his attention to those republicans who died fighting for Ireland to be free. He is unsymapthetic" "There's no use them wailing when they meet a soldier's fate" he concludes. Reading this ten years ago, I was struck by how true the sentiment sounded in spite of its harshness.
Daly was talking about those who died during the War of Independence over eighty years ago but his words seem equally applicable to republicans who were killed during the Troubles of the past thirty-five years. Indeed Joxer's words are more relevant than ever, since republican "wailing" over casualties is far shriller now than it ever was in the 1920s.
It seems to me that the Provisional movement has played a double-game over the course of the Troubles. They have wished to be seen as soldiers when handing out the misery but as ciivilians when recieving it. To be fair to the Provos, "soldier" is not a term which they use to describe themselves. They prefer the more leftist and revolutionary sounding word "volunteer" to describe their activists.
In spite of this, I feel that it is fair to use the term. After all the "A" in "IRA" stands for "army". What's more, republcans often speak of the conflict over the last few decades as a "war". In any caes the term "volunteer", in its strict dictionary sense, is equally appliable to those against whom the IRA fought: the British Army and the RUC, since neither of these forces is based on conscription.
Since the IRA's self-image is of an army which fought a war it seems fair to say that they percieve themselves as soldiers, whether they choose to use that word or not.
Yet in spite of this militarist self-image, the IRA frequently "wailed" when its members met bloody ends at the hands of crown forces. Their political organ, Sinn Fein, cried "human rights abuse" after the death of each IRA activist. Families of dead republicans have often pursued their loved one's killers through the legal system, sometimes going as far as the European Court of Human Rights in the search for justice.
But why should this be so? If these men and women were volunteers/soldiers, why should their organisation feel it is unjust that they were killed? After all in war, soldiers die. C'est la guerre, n'est pas? Yes, it's true that many IRA members were shot in situations where lethal force could have been avoided. But republicans are on shaky ground here since they themselves felt no compunction about shooting soldiers in the back or gunning down police officers in their beds as their families looked on. You can't demand that your opponent observes Queensbury rules if you're busy punchng him in the bollocks.
If the IRA is an army then it must be the first army in history to consider the infliction of casualties on it by the enemy as a matter for the courts. Other guerilla groups certainly don't thnk that way. I can't imagine that your average insurgent in Fallujah reacts to incoming US fire by thinking: "Gosh, the Americans are shooting at me! How jolly unsporting of them! They shall be receiving a rather blunt letter from my solicitor first thing tomorrow morning."
It helps to look at an example of this double-game in action. In 1988 the IRA attempted to attack a police station in the County Armagh town of Loughgall. The SAS were lying in wait and ambushed the republicans, killing all eight of them. Two civilians in a passing car who happened to be wearing overalls similair to those worn by the unfortunate IRA men were also cut down.
This was the bloodiest of many attacks by the SAS on republican paramilitaries in the 1980s during the infamous "shoot to kill" period. No reasonable person could look at what happened that day and conclude other than that the SAS intended to kill those whom they ambushed. After all "arrest" is not very prominent in the SAS lexicon. Like so many others, this incident ended up in the courts.
First let's consider the killings in Louughgall from the perspective that the IRA men shot that day were civilians rather than soldiers. In any civilised society the forces of the state must at least try to arrest armed suspects even if it would be "easier" just to shoot them. Yet no attempt was made to arrest the eight men. They were never given the chance to surrender, they were simply slaughtered. If these men were civilians then republicans are quite right to charcterise what happened that day as "state-sanctioned murder". From this point of view, the SAS action in Loughgall was a disgrace and they were quite rightly pursued through the courts over it.
But what if the IRA men that day were not civilians but rather soldiers fighting in a war? Well then that changes everything. Those men went to Loughgall to kill other soldiers but instead, they themselves were killed. The intelligence capability of the British allowed them to "get the drop" on the IRA. Loughgall was nothing more, or less, than a military reverse for the IRA, the kind which any army experiences during a war. From the IRA's perspective, it was something to be learnt from, not someting to complain about.
But of course republicans, such adroit propagandists, want it both ways. They want to honour their "glorious fallen" while also gaining maximum international sympathy by pursuing the killers of their "soldiers" through the legal system.
The hypocrisy of this would be breathtaking if it weren't so utterly typical of the Provisional movement.