Dissenting republican thinker Anthony McIntyre, in an article in The Blanket, described the murdered spy Denis Donaldson as "an agent of the peace process". In the Sunday Independent Eoghan Harris says that Donaldson "did some service to both states". Harris also has a good go at the pundits who resort to cliches like "murky world", "shadowy figures" and "mavericks" in their attempt to speculate that Donaldson could have been killed by "almost anyone". This type of superficial analysis would certainly suit the Sinn Féin spin that the most likely culprits were dissident republicans or some faction within the British securocrats.
It's much more reasonable to assume that those responsible for Donaldson's murder came from within the Provisional IRA. After all there is a long tradition of executing informers. There are many in the rank-and-file of the Provisionals who are deeply unhappy with where the Adams leadership of the movement has taken them. They see the core principles of republicanism as having been abandoned in favour of a parliamentary nationalism no different in substance to that peddled by the SDLP since 1971. To them the last straw has been the joint British-Irish moves against IRA criminality with the raids and confiscations in the south Armagh area. Ed Moloney has little doubt that all this points to "malcontents inside the Provisional IRA as the likeliest culprits, whose reason for killing Donaldson would be to protest the policy of excusing high level informers and by so doing make a wider point about where the peace process has brought republicans".
None of this will worry the British and Irish governments so long as the "bigger picture" is kept in mind. Brendan O'Connor describes the circular logic of the position of the British and Irish states:
Blair and Bertie are so determined to foist this peace process on us at all costs that they are prepared to forgive Sinn Fein/IRA anything. Look at the logic: nothing will ever damage the peace process because by definition anyone who does anything to damage the peace process must not be a friend of the peace process, therefore no one involved in the peace process can ever, by definition, do anything to damage it. I know. It's confusing in one way, yet beautiful in its simplicity. And it is a never-ending circle that can never be disproven, and that ring-fences the peace process from pretty much anything that could damage it
This essentially amoral realpolitik approach dominates attitudes to the peace process at the level of officials and elites. Thus the approach to paramilitaries, in terms of their past crimes, is purely pragmatic, a tribunal here, an enquiry there. Robin Wilson of Democratic Dialogue wonders how this can bring about genuine reconciliation. He worries that "there seems no real appreciation in either government of the fundamental lack of a moral compass in dealing with paramilitaries, which has alternated over the years between repression and appeasement, in each case at the expense of the rule of law and the emergence of something akin to a normal civil society." The British and Irish governments are content to pursue a consociational model of democracy of elite coalitions while the base of the population remains segmented. We cannot expect that levels of trust and proper dialogue will be pursued by government. This will have to emerge from within civil society such as it exists in Northern Ireland.
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