Media coverage tends to focus on certain narratives and not others. One concern is the coverage of Northern Ireland in the American press where the Republican movement is invaiably presented as violent, and a road block to peace. One issue that had received gobs of coverage recently is the question of the decommissioning of IRA arms. It is not a story I monitor closely, but my old friend Daniel Patrick Cassidy, who heads up the Irish Studies Program at the New College in San Francisco does. He sent me this recent editorial from www.irishabroad.com which offers a perspective that is often missing in most media accounts. Please share your reactions to it by hitting RESPOND at the end of this post.

Loyalists Have Guns Too

Editorial

WHERE in the US have you read any of the following three stories from the Irish Times in the past week?

The answer is nowhere. The US media has become so fixated on the IRA weapons issue that they are missing the numerous attempts of Loyalist extremists to upend the peace process. As the stories show, in the past week alone they have shot up a community center in Belfast where a children’s summer school was taking place, threatened hospital workers and left a series of pipe bombs in Nationalist areas. As we reveal this week, the intended target in the school shooting was Joe Doherty, the former IRA prisoner in the US who received a huge international profile because of his attempts to avoid extradition to Northern Ireland. Doherty was recently informed he was on a Loyalist death list, so it is hardly surprising that they attempted to kill him. Fortunately, he arrived some 25 minutes after the shooting. After the school shooting, Loyalists made it clear that they consider every Nationalist a legitimate target as the quote above shows. That is hardly in doubt.

When they recently shot dead Ciaran Cummings, a 19-year-old in Co Antrim, they stated that because the Nationalist population had the temerity to elect two Sinn Fein candidates, then all Nationalists were legitimate targets. In the context of this violence it is significant to note that the one organization that did some symbolic decommissioning, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, is the one carrying out most of the shootings and killings at present, in tandem with the Ulster Defense Association. Both are using convenient cover names.

Loyalists are clearly hoping to draw the IRA back into a war and thereby destroy the peace process. The Ulster Defense Association (UDA) recently announced that they were no longer party to that peace process, confirming what has been evident for some time - that they are back in the business of killing Catholics. The threat posed by these outlaw elements in the Loyalist community should not be underestimated. Fourteen of the 16 deaths that occurred last year were Loyalist hits. Six of the eight this year are also traceable to them.

Why, then, the continuing obsession with IRA guns? Perhaps the media is unwilling to accept that there is any other story line except the cool, clean definition that it is all currently the IRA’s fault that the peace process is stalled. Yes, the IRA bears responsibility for their end of the bargain, but is their task made any easier by the current spate of violence directed against Nationalists? Of course not, and the fact that the RUC, which has been seen to be heavily involved with Loyalist hit squads in the past, is doing the investigating of these crimes makes it all the more unpalatable.

The American media needs to face up to their responsibilities in reporting the peace process too. There has been an exclusive focus on the IRA, whose guns are silent, and almost none on the Loyalists. It is time that changed to reflect the reality of what is actually happening.

Irish Voice Editorial NYC 7/26/01

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