The patience of the Protestant para-military groups will be severely tested by the two bombs in Northern Ireland on Monday night. The patience of the British and Irish Governments will be tested even further. And the security arrangements of the British armed forces in Northern Ireland have been tested and found wanting. The two car bombs went off inside the British army’s heavily defended headquarters.
So far no-one has claimed responsibility for the bombs, but the finger has been pointed at the IRA. The political wing of the IRA, the Sinn Fein, headed by Gerry Adams, has distanced itself for the bombing. Mr Adams says the only way to prevent further violence is for his organisation to be admitted to the peace talks. Sinn Fein has been excluded to date because it refused to renounce violence unconditionally.
The bomb, which injured 31 people, was the first in Northern Ireland for two years and threatens the fragile cease-fire being adhered to by the Protestant side, but breached by the IRA with bombings in the mainland. It is possible that the bombs will trigger a Protestant retaliation which would return the province to tit-for-tat bombing and shooting that marred the past 25 years.
Monday night’s attack was especially vicious. For a start the first bomb went off without warning in a parking lot, inside the main camp for the 18,000 troops in the province. Then a second bomb went off 20 minutes later near the base’s hospital, apparently to ambush passing soldiers, medical staff and people wounded by the first bomb. Clearly the bombing was designed to do more than humiliate the British army. It seemed designed to anger the Protestants into retaliation, something they should resist. It also seemed designed to sap British resolve, to make the public on the British mainland wonder whether it is worth keeping Northern Ireland which is costing too much in blood and money to be worth it.
Of course, judging the British character, it is likely to do precisely the opposite. British politicians thrive in adversity.
Ultimately, there must be a united Ireland. The absurdity of the British divide-and-rule colonial policy must come to an end. For now, the Protestant unionists in the corner of the island of Ireland that was artificially partitioned in the 1920s are a majority in that corner and they want to be part of Britain. Eventually, however, an overall view must be taken.
Bombings like the one this week can only postpone that day. Perhaps the perpetrators of the bombing want that postponement. The sort of people who engage in that sort of act are twisted enough to enjoy the state of violence … they prefer to be engaged in an endless violent fight for a united Ireland rather than to actually achieve it.
The only way the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland can achieve unity with the south in an expression of overall democratic will is through peaceful means. Only when the Protestants in the north realise they have nothing to fear will they lower their resistance.
The pettiness of the differences between the sides in Northern Ireland (fuelled more by prejudice that reality) will slowly be highlighted by events that surround them in Europe. While they are brawling among themselves, at the next level up, Britain and Ireland will become more integrated and unified, with such things as the single European currency and the over-arching European legal, administrative and human rights system, to the extent that whether Northern Ireland is part of Britain or Ireland will be of mush less moment. But that can only be the case if both sides have an extended period of cease-fire.