The implosion of the Irish Republican Army has been so sudden and complete that it seems to defy explanation. For 30 years, the banned paramilitary group commanded the loyalty of a large part of Northern Ireland's Catholic population, and had significant support in the Republic of Ireland, as well. Only months ago, its legal political wing, Sinn Fein, was still seen as a necessary partner in a power-sharing government that would finally restore self-government to Northern Ireland. And now, in a matter of weeks, the IRA has dwindled in most people's eyes to a mere criminal organisation.
It was real crimes that precipitated this dramatic change. The first was a #26.5 million ($398 million) bank robbery in Northern Ireland in December - an incident that would have been celebrated by IRA supporters in the days when it was a revolutionary organisation waging a guerilla war against British rule in the province, but was hard to defend 11 years after a ceasefire.
Then came a pub brawl in January in a Catholic area of Belfast in which 10 IRA members visiting from Derry for the Bloody Sunday commemoration knifed Robert McCartney, an innocent fork-lift driver and Sinn Fein supporter, to death. The killers then wiped the pub clean of their fingerprints, took the tape out of the security cameras, warned the 70 witnesses not to say anything on pain of death, and left.
That was standard operating procedure in the old days, when the IRA was seen as the Catholic community's only defence against the Protestants and the British authorities. But seven years after Sinn Fein committed itself to a peaceful political process, it is just murder and intimidation, and McCartney's five sisters, all lifelong IRA supporters themselves, refused to abide by the traditional code of silence. They publicly demanded that the IRA hand over their brother's killers to the authorities.
The IRA then offered to inflict 'punishment shootings' on the guilty men: bullets through their knees, wrists or elbows, designed to cripple but not kill. The sisters refused, but the message was clear: the group is still above the law.
The IRA stopped attacking the local police and British soldiers after the ceasefire of 1994, but it never abandoned violence in its own Catholic areas: dozens of people were killed over the years for 'transgressions' ranging from drug trafficking to winning fistfights against IRA members in bars. It did not abandon its 'fund-raising' activities, either: smuggling, extortion, money laundering and occasional robberies. The British government had long turned a blind eye to the IRA's involvement in these crimes in order not to damage the peace process. But that crashed in December when Protestant leader Ian Paisley demanded at least photographic proof that the IRA was really 'decommissioning' its weapons and it refused.
