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Collusion is no illusion

THe year 2005 – Sinn Féin’s centenary – showed that the party, despite further electoral success in the May Westminster election, has lost its surefooted PR touch. Witness the embarrassed floundering over the Robert McCartney murder, the Colombia Three’s return to Ireland and Denis Donaldson’s outing as a long term British agent.

According to the line promoted by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, this has nothing to do with them. It is all the fault of faceless ‘securocrats’ who are conspiring to destroy the Good Friday Agreement. ‘These people hate republicans with a passion’ says Mr Adams. ‘They believe that the British government should have declared war on republicans, not started down the road to a peace process.’ Leaving aside the fact that it was republicans who first declared the ‘war’ the only flaw in this claim is that the British State and the Provisional leadership actually collude on a shared agenda. This agenda is the full implementation of the GFA and all its side deals - over ‘on the run’ terror suspects, IRA decommissioning, ongoing Hibernicisation of all the institutions of society through so-called ‘equality legislation’ and traditional parades – to the exclusion of all the other parties.

Contacts were opened between Martin McGuinness and the British State in the early nineties using intermediaries from the secret services. The British State wants an end to its ‘Irish problem’ as cleanly as possible so that it can act on the world stage as America’s deputy. That’s why a small fortune has been spent on trying to keep the failed institutions of the deeply flawed GFA alive. That’s why every effort was made to swing the 1998 referendum on the GFA and to portray anyone who questioned it as a slavering warmonger. We note that Tom Kelly, who masterminded the successful Yes campaign, was recently awarded a gong in the New Year’s Honours List for his services to government.

The republican slogan Collusion is no illusion is right on the money but not in the way the Provos like to claim. The British State has done its damnedest to make sure that Adams and McGuinness remain alive and at the head of the republican movement for many years to come. The Brits had a foot in both camps of the republican movement—the IRA and Sinn Féin. The role of assets like Donaldson and Scappaticci were not to undermine the peace process but to bolster it. ‘Stakeknife’ and his ‘nutting squad’ removed low-level informers from the IRA and perhaps took the opportunity to remove hard-line opponents of the peace process who had not gone over to the dissident factions.

Denis Donaldson, who was the ‘leadership enforcer’ for the Republican movement had to ‘implement the shared agenda of two masters’ the Provo leadership and the British Secret State according to a leading republican critic of the Sinn Féin leadership, Dr Anthony McIntyre. According to McIntyre, Donaldson was particularly assiduous in ensuring the expulsion from the party of critics of the leadership’s line. Donaldson’s exposure has left the Sinn Féin leadership shaken by ‘revelations of how closely its own agenda and that of the British state overlap, has resorted to abandoning Donaldson in a manner that Scappaticci escaped’. – [Irish News 17/12/05]

The only thing in the Provo leadership’s favour is the complete failure of the unionist parties to put the boot in effectively!

.January 2006

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