Intelligencer

On or Off the Army Council?

So did Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris really take themselves off the Army Council of the IRA in preparation for the IRA statement expected this week?

All the media in Ireland and Britain ran with the story and attributed it to security sources. That alone should send up a red flag.

These are the same security sources who have constantly misread the IRA’s intentions going back all the way to August 1994 when they declared there was little hope of an IRA ceasefire.

The main focus of the Army Council is to discuss matters of war and peace and indeed, to sue for peace if they so desire. There is little question that Adams and company would have to have been active in that area over the past 10 years or so.

It hardly seems likely, though, that Adams, McGuinness and Ferris just removed themselves from the Council in the past week or so, as the media has reported it. Such a move would surely have been made some time ago in order to properly prepare the ground for the historic IRA statement.

Given the history of the movement it would have been very difficult for the three men to maintain a dual role as the peace process progressed.

New Split a Possibility?

How serious the split would depend on how high up the chain of command any defectors are. At the moment it seems a long shot that any senior figures will decide to breakaway.

After all, when the Real IRA, under Mickey McKevitt, tried to breakaway a few years back their efforts ended in disaster with the Omagh bombing.

It seems more likely that the figures opposing will just fade away and drop out of any involvement with the movement, which is certainly what has happened to date with most dissenters.

However, there remains a possibility that a hardened few may decide to fly in the face of reality and try to start up an armed faction again. Unlikely, but nonetheless possible.

McGuinness to Come to America

Sinn Fein Chief Negotiator Martin McGuinness will likely be on a plane to the U.S. on Wednesday to brief senior figures in Congress and in the Irish American community on the IRA statement.

He will arrive in the nick of time, just before Congress takes its annual summer break. There is no doubt that the absence of major figures in Washington was one of the fears that Republicans had about holding back their statement any longer.

McGuinness is expected to meet with U.S. Special Envoy Mitchell Reiss and leading figures in Congress including Senator Ted Kennedy. In a world seemingly gone mad with terrorism, the news that the IRA is abandoning the armed struggle will be a welcome respite.

Blair on IRA Vs. Al Qaeda

On Tuesday, Tony Blair was tackled at his press conference on the London bombings about the difference between the IRA bombs in Britain and the current attacks.

It was a matter of scale, he said. While he condemned all terrorism, there was little question that if the fundamentalists could kill 50,000 Britons they would in an instant.

Blair stated that as they proved in New York on September 11, al-Qaeda is capable of mass murder. IRA casualties tended to be much smaller, he said, and they had a political agenda, one that many moderate Nationalists also aspired to.

Blair noted that the Islamic fundamentalists have no coherent political agenda at all, making it impossible to imagine any political accommodation with them.

She Has the Right Stuff

Time was when Eileen Collins, commander of the latest shuttle mission, landed in Ireland on a visit and immediately went to Cork to look for her relatives. Alas, she found a phone book with so many Collinses she didn’t even know where to begin.

Yet she remains incredibly attached to her Irish roots, as she told our sister publication Irish America magazine in May 2000.

On her mother’s side she knows they hail from Clare while the Cork ancestry is on her father’s side.

In homage to her Irish roots she called her first child Bridget Marie after one of the few Irish relatives she could find.

Amazingly, she didn’t fly in an airline until she was 19 years old. She grew up in relative poverty in Elmira, New York.

Her parents split up when she was nine year sold and the family was on food stamps for a time before her mother got it together.

Only in America could someone with such an unpromising background make it literally to the top of the world. She was present when she was inducted as one of the Irish America magazine’s Irish Americans of the Century back in 2000, and there is little question that no one deserved the honor more. Let’s hope Eileen and her crew all come back safe and sound.