IRA groping for an initiative

DOES the Inglis Barracks bombing in north London this week mark the start of a new IRA campaign of murder on the mainland?
The organisation has always cynically and cold bloodedly admitted, even boasted, that one murder in mainland Britain is worth ten deaths in the north of Ireland in terms of the terrorists' public profile.
Yet the random nature of recent ill-targetted outrages both in the province and on continental Europe would suggest that the IRA leadership at the moment is at best confused and without a clear strategy, if not without any control at all over its operatives.
The IRA has, thanks to effective and too little praised security operations, been having a lean time lately. Its mainland forays — plans to disrupt Mark Thatcher's wedding, to bomb 14 seaside resorts, for example — have been stifled at birth by police and army intelligence operations.
Their supply of weaponry has been much depleted by enormous finds by the Irish gardai — again events which went virtually unnoticed and uncongratulated. Even their seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of manpower amid poor, disaffected Catholic young men in the ghettos of Belfast and Derry is running dry. Their best people are behind bars, and privately disown the ill-trained, hotheaded, almost gangster-like operatives who have carried out a series of bungled operations in Northern Ireland, leaving the IRA leadership to apologise publicly for the carnage of Enniskillen, for the murder of an innocent family returning from holiday two weeks ago, and for many other deaths, unjustifiable even by their evil logic.
The IRA hierarchy, torn between the conflicting ideologies of ballot box and armalite are clearly reeling. The success of the security forces has left them with waning support, and confused. The ballot box strategy cannot support the bungling of recent months in the North. And the terrorist campaign will never succeed in the face of local and British government determination and ceaseless courage, and war-weariness amongst Catholics in the North.
The crisis in the IRA should not, however, allow complacency to creep in. The terrorists are at their most dangerous when on the run — as this week's attack on a "soft" target showed. Whatever the security operations mounted, there will always be some easy options for those whose hatred is fanatical.
There is no answer, no easy peaceful way forward. But the very basic starting point for a political solution has to centre on the establishment of a system of justice in the north that makes no differential, and is seen to make no differential, between terrorists who murder, police and army who commit crimes, SAS operatives in Gibraltar and petty criminals. All must be subject to the one, impartial rule of law. All must face their accusers in a court of law, and be tried by a judge.
Only when the people of Northern Ireland perceive that everyone is subject to the law will they learn to trust in that law. And only when that trust has replaced the present state with everyone relying only on their wits can political and democratic processes start to work.
Tom King, regarded before his appointment as Northern Ireland Secretary as another of Margaret Thatcher's faceless second string cabinet yes-men, has shown resolve, compassion, and strength of character in his handling of his portfolio.
His selfless devotion to spending time in Northern Ireland listening to the demands and grievances of all sides contrasts rather sharply with the recent antics of New York's Mayor Ed Koch and Cardinal John O'Connor.
Mr King will win no political advancement by his continued tenure of the Northern Ireland office, regarded as a bit of backwater by ambitious go-getters. Mayor Koch, by contrast, came to Ireland anxious to win his city's Irish vote.
His twisting and turning over his views on the British presence in the north that has followed his return to New York are unedifying. Cardinal O'Connor's reported support for the "troops out" philosophy — enunciated to journalists accompanying him back from Ireland to America — is plain mistaken. Too many American politicos swan in and out of Northern Ireland and imagine in two days that they have all the answers. Withdrawing the troops would simply precipitate a bloodbath, and would solve none of the institutional, historical and attitudinal problems.
In fact it simply plays into the hands of the extremists the IRA and their Loyalist brothers in murder, the UDF and ensures that America's Irish community will continue to support the terrorists out of a mistaken, romantic and ultimately fatal attraction for the goal of a united Ireland. The weapons that the IRA used to destroy barracks in north London and kill innocent British soliders are paid for, in part, by this American lobby. Cardinal O'Connor and Mayor Koch has done nothing to stem the flow.