Magazine Article

After the IRA makes zero progress on giving up its guns, Britain threatens to suspend home rule for Ulster; 'We'll Never Decommission'

Stryker McGuire and Rod Nordland

2000

Overview

Within a 10-mile radius of this small town, 165 soldiers and policemen have been killed, along with 75 civilians, since the Troubles began 31 years ago. Nobody in Crossmaglen wants to return to that, but decommissioning is another matter: that's evident at Short's Bar. The bar was once destroyed by an IRA rocket-propelled grenade (it fell a couple of hundred yards short of the RUC base). The owner, Paddy Short, claims to still have a bullet in his shoulder from a \"dispute\" with British soldiers. Short is a well-known supporter of the IRA and the uncle of a British cabinet minister, Clare Short. He once appeared in court as a character witness for alleged IRA commander Thomas (Slab) Murphy, whose farm is a few miles outside of town. (A newspaper in 1985 identified Murphy as the IRA's operations commander in Northern Ireland; Murphy sued for libel and lost, in 1998.) Decommissioning? \"Go to hell with your decommissioning,\" says Short, to much agreement from the noontime crowd one day last week. \"The IRA called a ceasefire, and the Army still won't leave.\" The IRA may be small--with perhaps 200 hard-core active members and a support network of an additional 1,000, according to security sources--but on decommissioning it looms large. Despite Sinn Fein's rising popularity, \"the armed struggle has a veto on the political process,\" says Malachi O'Doherty, author of \"The Trouble With Guns,\" a book about the IRA. [Gerry Adams], who denies he is an IRA member, says Sinn Fein can neither speak for the IRA nor make it turn over its weapons. But he evidently knows enough about the IRA to issue warnings to people who mess with it. At the outset of last week's decommissioning battle, as pressure mounted on the IRA to budge, Adams pushed back. He warned unionists that coercion was not going to work: if they thought they could play hardball with the IRA, \"they're playing it with the wrong people.\" Is Adams right or wrong? With the clock ticking away in Northern Ireland, we're about to find out.

• Publisher: Newsweek Publishing LLC