Traitors have played a crucial part in achieving the fragile agreement which has put republicans, nationalists, unionists and protestant fundamentalists in the same Northern Ireland cabinet. Traitors, that is, to the cause of Irish republicanism: an immensely powerful ideology, perhaps the most powerful of such geists in the western world. For much of the past century, its common principle was an assumption of Irish victimhood and British guilt, sewn into a seamless web of historical oppression.
But the traitors have cracked that fa?ade. From within the republic and from within republicanism has come a critique which, while not (usually) taking sides with the British-and often being detailed and frank about the blacker parts of British rule in pre-independence Ireland-has made its main targets the narrowness and bigotry in its own backyard.
The traitors were as much a sign of change in Ireland as harbingers of it. But their words have been crucial to modernising politics, in both the south and north. Catholics in the north had in the past often become unionists of a kind; some rose to high positions in the state. But in doing so they folded themselves into a unionist culture (while remaining suspect to the more bigoted members of it). Today's traitors do not regard themselves as bound to cross any Rubicons: they can remain in an Irish culture which they have made capacious enough for dissent and self-examination.
Some of the republican revisionists have sought to engage with the civic unionism of David Trimble, now first minister of Northern Ireland. These people have helped to infuse unionism with the beginnings of an understanding of the diversity of Irish thought; and to provide it with a strategic and dispassionate view of republicanism, both in its carefully cultivated hatred of Britishness and in its struggle to locate itself in democratic practice. This contradictory, one-step-forward two-steps-back movement in republicanism could be embraced with too much gratitude, as it was under the Northern Ireland secretaryship of Mo Mowlam; or rejected as a con trick, as it has been by the Democratic Unionist Party of Ian Paisley and the UK Unionist Party (now split) of Robert McCartney. In order to stay with the peace process, the Ulster Unionists needed both some faith that republicans could engage with a pluralist society and a guide to its violent mind set. The traitors gave them both.
ireland is now too contented for anti-British radicalism. Its standard of living has, in the past decade, grown faster than that of any other member of the EU. Irish politicians have become high-profile officials in an EU which gives Ireland, with 3.6m citizens, the same formal importance as 80m-strong Germany. The gnawing sense that the British sneer at the Irish is, if not gone, (it is sometimes, if vestigially, true) no longer irksome. Concern about the north is a low priority for a nation which has abandoned the vision of rural virtue which Eamon de Valera held before his countrymen for half of the 20th century. As part of the negotiations between the British and Irish governments over peace in the north, the republic has now excised the provisions in the constitution (drafted by de Valera 60 years ago) which explicitly claimed ownership of the north, replacing it with a vague aspiration for unity by consent. This was carried almost unanimously in a referendum in the south.
Embourgeoisement has loosened the inhibition against self-criticism. The Church, which de Valera had allowed an effective veto over divorce, the sale of contraceptives and abortion, and a huge influence in state education, is now on the defensive. A shocking number of its priests have been revealed as abusers of the children in its care, and the recruitment of young men with a vocation into the main training college at Maynooth has fallen to critically low levels. These things have been fully picked over in the media in Ireland, as have corruption scandals reaching back into the 1960s and reaching up to the office of successive prime ministers. Commentators point out that the system in Britain is more transparent or more rapid to give redress-inconceivable in previous decades. A debate has even started about Irish anti-semitism, led by historian Dermot Keogh.
The best of Irish writers and journalists, once regarded as the cutting edge of the anti-imperialist struggle, are now like writers in other rich nations: detached, cool, determined to make up their own minds-and distrustful of any appeal to Mother Ireland. Historically, such scepticism has been rare but not completely unknown: James Joyce's famous story The Dead was hostile to the illiberalism of republicanism as were writers such as Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty and Frank O'Connor in the 1920s. But the contemporary movement coinciding with the latter period of the IRA's 30-year-old campaign in the north has played a directly political role far beyond the largely disregarded dissent of earlier Irish intellectuals and writers.
The figurehead in recent times has been Conor Cruise O'Brien, writer and critic, Irish cabinet minister, diplomat and UN official, who has been the increasingly outspoken critic of his own tradition of Irish nationalism. He set a style and sowed seeds in unlikely places. Sean O'Callaghan, the former IRA official who turned informer and became the most radical traitor to his cause, recalls in his memoir, The Informer: "I remember reading an anti-nationalist analysis by Conor and flinging it away in disgust but always coming back to it." Martin McGartland, another informer from within the IRA, also names O'Brien-in Dead Man Running, the second volume of his memoirs-as a key influence in turning him away from violence.
In 1972 O'Brien wrote his classic States of Ireland which argued for a two-state solution to the Irish question. This attracted much scorn but influenced a younger generation of revisionist historians who began to question the black and white of nationalist history. Gradually O'Brien has become less lonely in his apostasy. In a recent New Republic review of a book by the Irish-Australian Thomas Keneally, Fintan O'Toole dismisses Keneally's treatment of the oppression of Ireland as simplistic, concluding that the true story of contemporary Ireland is "riddled with contradictions and ambiguities... as it struggles to throw off the self-pity that fuels violence and attempts to come to terms with its new responsibilities as a member of the privileged company of wealthy nations." O'Toole is the most influential of the new generation of Irish writers and journalists and he has been a remorseless and understanding (not the same thing as sympathetic) chronicler of the fall of the pillars of the republic-the Church, Fianna F?il and, above all, victimhood. "Being Irish," he wrote in 1994, about John F Kennedy, "meant that however rich and powerful you were, you carried with you the elan of the oppressed, just as, back home, being part of the nationalist movement meant that you didn't actually have to tackle oppression: your very presence in power was a blow against oppression."
Similarly, Colm T?ib?n, an Irish novelist, recently performed the unusual feat of writing about the Irish famine in such a way as to expose both the depths of 19th-century British insouciance and the cynicism with which the event has been co-opted into Ireland's national shroud. Commenting in the London Review of Books on the US-based Irish Famine Curriculum Committee, which strives to include the famine in Holocaust studies, he wrote that the document which it submitted to a commission on Holocaust education was "full of emotional language, selective quotation and a vicious anti-English rhetoric. It asserts, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the famine. It is as shocking in its carelessness and its racism as The Times editorials were during and after the famine. It is clear that the authors of the document want us all to be victims together. When they set foot in the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, they will be in for a shock."
Roddy Doyle, Ireland's best-known writer of the younger generation, has joined in, too. His new novel, A Star Called Henry, set around the Easter Rising, ends with his IRA gunman hero wholly disillusioned with the cause and the bigoted men who pursued it. The Northern Irish writer Carlo G?bler-son of nationalist sympathising writer Edna O'Brien-wrote in the Irish Times that it was "a brilliant act of apostasy... showing that Ireland post-truce was no different from the old Anglo-Ireland, except that the new clique got to run it for their own benefit."
Revisionism is not restricted to the historians and the literati. A group of political commentators regularly pound republicanism and nationalism-and laud the moderate northern unionism of David Trimble. (In this respect, Conor Cruise O'Brien did not provide a model: at the beginning of the 1990s he joined the UK Unionist Party led by the barrister Robert McCartney; the party was fiercely against talks which included the IRA, is opposed to the Good Friday Agreement and has split after poor performances in the polls.) Eoghan Harris, a former member of the Official IRA (the Marxist side of the split which happened in the 1970s and which turned its back on violence and itself into the Workers party) writes a column in the Irish Sunday Times which roars contempt at republicanism; and Eilis O'Hanlon, niece of the veteran IRA leader Joe Cahill, writes a column from Belfast in the Dublin-based Sunday Independent which is detailed, waspish and knowledgeable about Sinn Fein and the IRA in the North.
Malachi O'Doherty, also Belfast-based, is a writer and documentary film-maker. He recently conducted a one-man survey of opinion about Orange Order marches in the largely catholic Lower Ormeau Road, and discovered that most were unconcerned about the banging drums and anti-catholic songs, or at least thought the marchers had a right to march. (This view is contrary to that ascribed to the catholic communities by Sinn Fein, which argues that such marches are threatening and "supremacist.") O'Doherty's book, The Trouble with Guns, is among the clearest expos?s of the tactics used by republicans to encircle the catholic communities in a protective grip, as much to keep them from making new links with their protestant compatriots as to shield them from attack.
The Irish novelist Ruth Dudley Edwards has gone furthest of all. From a chance invitation from a protestant farmer that she come to the north to discover the reality about unionists, she became a great fan of the angular Presbyterian culture of the province and has just published a history of the Orange Order which represents it as a decent, civic organisation of patriots who simply wish to remain British. Dudley Edwards became, like O'Callaghan and Harris, an admirer of and confidante to Trimble, recognising in this awkward self-questioning man someone who was open enough to ride a wave whose destination he could not know, and clever enough to benefit from constant argument about his tactics and strategy.
At the annual meeting of the Ulster Unionists in Enniskillen in November, Trimble a little recklessly agreed to a panel of writers addressing his members, many of whom are hostile to his approach. Two of these balanced each other out: Eamonn Mallie, a reporter from a nationalist background; and Dean Godson, chief leader writer of the London Daily Telegraph, who is writing a biography of Trimble (with his cooperation but not approval) and is hostile to the agreement. But the other two were Ruth Dudley Edwards and Eoghan Harris: both told the delegates that they were the salt of the earth, but both in different ways urged them to back Trimble in his efforts to construct a government with Sinn Fein. Harris told the delegates that they were morally superior to every other actor on the political scene and should thus accept the agreement and put the onus on the British government for policing its terms, crucially including disarmament. After Harris finished I heard a grey-haired woman whisper: "Good heavens, what are we coming to?" But her tone was amused and admiring, and the applause was generous. It is hard to think of any other political party in Britain which would have invited such people to address it.
underpinning these shifts in the literary and journalistic worlds has been some remarkable work done by a few activists, mainly catholic, often formerly republican, to puncture the moral pretensions of republicanism. One such is Chris Hudson, a union official whose uncle was killed while fighting on the radical republican side of the Irish civil war. In his youth Hudson was a republican in the Irish town of Dun Laoghaire; but, like O'Callaghan and McGartland, he was seduced by O'Brien's writings and began to think that republicanism should be countered by letting people in the south hear the unionist point of view. In 1993, he was invited by one of the loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force (with many catholic murders on its conscience), to be a conduit between them and the Irish government, as they considered declaring a ceasefire. In November this son and nephew of Brit-hating republicans received from the Queen a medal which makes him a Member of the British Empire.
One of the groups Hudson helped to grow was a Belfast organisation named Families Against Intimidation and Terror (Fait). It was founded in 1991, when paramilitary violence against the police and army was diminishing but was growing within the two communities. Its two moving figures were Henry Robinson, a young former Official IRA man who had served time in jail; and Nancy Gracie, a catholic woman whose son had been "kneecapped"-hooded, bound and shot through both knees-by the IRA, on suspicion of informing. Fait took off when Sam Cushnahan joined it about a year later. Cushnahan had been born in the catholic working class milieu of the Lower Falls Road. "That means," he says, in his North Belfast home, "that I am just as streetwise as the bloody IRA." Cushnahan had no republican background and had not suffered directly at the hands of the IRA or any of the Loyalist paramilitaries. He had a small flooring business and is a member of the Alliance party, a liberal group which has sought to span the gulf between the two communities. He simply grew to hate what he saw as the cant of Sinn Fein; and to despise the romantic view of Irish nationalism which was exported abroad, particularly to the US. "Sinn Fein and the IRA played on the romantic vision of the little white cottage with the woman in the shawl and the man with the pitchfork and the awful British oppressor coming around the corner with a gun. I used to read these letters in the press here from Irish Americans and from Senator this and Congressman that about the cruelty of the Brits, and I would write letters back to them directly saying look, it's not like that now."
Fait has been hugely important. It gave the punished assistance, helping them to leave Ireland if they had been threatened with death or torture; it reported incidents to the RUC which had often gone unreported; above all, it gave tongue to the hideousness of what was being done, in catholic and protestant working class areas, in the grey housing projects with the multicoloured murals of solidarity and hate.
Fait ground to a halt in early 1999, as internal tensions wracked it and Cushnahan had to slow down because of a bad heart. But its work is carried on by Vincent McKenna, under the banner of the Human Rights Bureau. McKenna has been the target of newspaper stories alleging sexual misdemeanours and deceit; he says, flatly, that it is IRA propaganda recycled by the malign or the credulous. His friends and supporters insist that, whatever the truth of the allegations, he does work of great value.
On McKenna's figures, about 4,000 under-18-year-old boys have suffered some form of IRA or loyalist punishment since the Good Friday Agreement was signed: 16 have been murdered; 51 shot; 189 have been beaten; and nearly 2,500 have been forced from their homes. In a recent case, two catholic brothers, Martin Groogan, 15, and Edward, 18, were beaten with clubs and then told to get out in 48 hours. McKenna, working through a Christian group called Maranatha, found them homes in Britain.
Many of these punishments are a form of community justice for criminal behaviour. But those handing out the punishments do not distinguish between, say, drug dealing and insulting a local para-military boss; their threat to society is independent of the guilt of their victims. Maureen Kearney, once a keen Sinn Fein supporter, knew this only too well. Her son, Andrew, was shot dead in spring 1999 by, she believes, the IRA, after he had a quarrel with an IRA area commander in a pub. I interviewed her earlier this year at her house on the Ballymurphy estate, marked off with pro-republican paintings and slogans. She seemed composed, courteous and wholly determined to tell her story to the maximum embarrassment of the IRA which she had supported all of her 60 years. "I know the man who ordered it; he is a coward. He sent a whole squad of killers after Andrew; my son was in a flat with his baby son and his partner, and they came in and shot him in front of them. He wasn't dead; they got him out and into the lift to go down for the ambulance but the IRA had jammed the lift and he bled to death in it."
Kearney confronted "the man who ordered it," but he pretended ignorance. She was a constant embarrassment to Sinn Fein and the IRA; untouchable because of her age, sex, grief and republican pedigree, yet loud in her anger and disillusionment. Fortunately for those she was embarrassing, she died of a heart attack-some say of a broken heart-in August.
finally to the real traitors-the handful of remarkable men who, active in the IRA, then betrayed it to the British or Irish security services. Three of these, Eamon Collins, Martin McGartland and Sean O'Callaghan, were especially prominent, in part because they have all written memoirs. Yet during the past year, the first has been murdered, the second was almost murdered and the third warned that murder might be getting closer. Collins, in his book Killing Rage, gives what seems a frank account of his career in the IRA as an ultra militant-one who once accused Gerry Adams of being too soft (and got into deep trouble for doing so). Arrested, he turned "supergrass." He later returned to a family farm in the Irish border town of Newry, an IRA stronghold, believing (as he wrote in his memoir) that "my case had been pretty much forgotten with the passage of the years, as happens in this strange corner of Ireland." But someone did remember and he was gunned down in January 1999.
McGartland was almost killed by the IRA in early 1999. He was an IRA volunteer who turned informer and for four years worked inside the organisation as an agent for RUC special branch. He claims he saved 50 lives: his memoir, published in 1997, was called Fifty Dead Men Walking. The IRA command, desperately searching for the informer they knew was in the organisation's midst, locked on to him in 1996, and detailed a punishment squad to take him to a safe apartment on the Twinbrook estate near Lisburn. McGartland asked to use the toilet: he passed a bath filled with water in preparation for his interrogation, a form of torture which involves prolonged and repeated submergings. Alone for a minute, he hurled himself out of the window, 40 feet up. Of the three would-be torturers, two were later identified by McGartland as James McCarthy and Paul Hamilton, who became bodyguards for Gerry Adams and shepherded him to Dublin airport for his first trip to the US in September 1994. They raced down to the street to drag him back up, but McGartland was saved by a British Army helicopter.
He survived, and moved to the north of England. He wrote his book, formed relationships, lost some of his fear. But his cover was carelessly blown by local police who prosecuted him for a driving offence. On 17th January this year, he came out of his house in Whitley Bay and got into his car. "I saw a sports jacket, then two thuds," he told me. "I was thrown across the car to the passenger seat; a hand came through the window with a 9mm automatic in it to finish me off. I grabbed the gun and twisted it away from my face. He shot again and the bullet went into me through my hand. Then he stepped back and fired twice again. I think he panicked after I grabbed the gun; he should have put a bullet in the head-that's what the IRA is told to do-but he ran off."
McGartland, who was in intensive care for a week, is now under 24-hour police protection. He is nervy, his words tumbling out in a jagged flow: a rant of bitterness that the police had been so careless, mixed with contempt for Sinn Fein and the IRA.
Sean O'Callaghan is the most remarkable of the pentiti-those who have turned against the culture in which they have been raised. A former senior IRA officer, he killed twice. One of his victims, in 1974, was a catholic member of the RUC special branch named Peter Flanagan. After the murder, he was struck with a sense of futility and guilt; the leaders of the movement, whom he had been taught to revere, seemed petty and stupid. Taking refuge in a priest's house who "was as good as regarded as a senior IRA activist" he felt disgust for the holy father's characterisation of the man he had murdered. "Flanagan," said the priest, meaning to exculpate O'Callaghan, "was an abominable man who sold his soul to the devil." He writes: "I knew that what was motivating the priest had nothing to do with secular republicanism and was simply ethnic catholic nationalism." He walked in the Tyrone hills, near the border with the republic, and talked to an old catholic farmer who pointed out the farms "stolen from us by those protestant bastards"-stolen, that is, three centuries ago. O'Callaghan reflects that to hear such things "is to understand the emotive power of blood and earth... This was a war between catholics and protestants, not against the British. I might want to attack a British army patrol, but the local IRA man would rather shoot a protestant neighbour."
So he turned informer, for the Irish special branch, even as he rose through the IRA ranks to become head of the southern command. Among the operations he says he managed to abort was an attempt to murder Prince Charles and Diana at a London theatre. Feeling that those who suspected him of informing within the IRA were closing on him, he turned himself in, served eight years of a prison sentence in Britain for the murders he had committed, and came out to continue the fight by other means.
O'Callaghan is skeletally thin, with a cap of brown greying hair and a big moustache. He appears to live on coffee and strong cigarettes (his former wife has told him that "your chest will kill you before the IRA does"). He lives an astonishingly open life: although he moves flats often and can be talked to only by leaving a message on his mobile phone, he runs campaigns, meets MPs and officials. More than that, he has been working with hardline loyalist paramilitaries to try to shore up their wavering attachment to the peace process and is used as an unacknowledged and unpaid adviser to the British government. His supporters believe that he is the man the IRA most want to get rid of, but that they are constrained in part by being unable to find him, in part by his closeness to the British political class-and David Trimble himself-with whom they are negotiating a deal.
I went with him in August 1998 to an Orange Order rally in Pomeroy, in Tyrone, where years earlier the farmer had talked to him of "protestant bastards." Although he tried to be inconspicuous, he was spotted by an Orange lodge leader who shouted: "There is O'Callaghan, the IRA killer!" I was near him, and saw him slip away through woods to a car-escaping from those whom he was seeking to help; a man hated by the extremes on both sides. Earlier this year, he was told by his "minders" that an IRA group might be getting to know his movements; it seems to have made little difference. "There's no point," he told me, "letting them dictate my life to me utterly. If you cower in a corner you're finished anyway."
The advice he has given to unionists, loyalists, Orangemen and to the British government about the republican mind is complex and detailed. But like most other prominent traitors, he shares the view that the republican leadership is moving away from violence-notwithstanding the IRA death penalty that still hangs over him personally. His testimony of the often sordid humanity of his old comrades has contributed to an approach by unionists and the British government which eschews simplicities and keeps the process staggering along. If peace lasts it will owe a lot to Sean O'Callaghan, although he is unlikely ever to become a Member of the British Empire.
