Letter: Preconditions on IRA talks

Sir: As we near a possible crossroads in the process of finding peace in Northern Ireland, a trap is opening up. The IRA is told that it must renounce violence as a pre- condition to negotiation, while at the same time the recently published communications between it and the UK government show an organisation with a precarious hold on some of its people in the field. In such a situation, setting this pre-condition could actually have the effect of intensifying the very violence one wants to end.

The reason is as follows. There have been two different strategies followed from within the IRA: sometimes violence has been used to try to force the UK government to the negotiating table and sometimes to keep it away from that negotiating table. The latter seems, some of the time, to have come from a part of the membership which the central command has difficulty in controlling. If that central command is now cornered into formally repudiating violence in order to be able to sit at the negotiating table, then whatever residual control it has over this element would be lost, with the result that many now in the field who will feel they have been sold out will feel free to engage in a campaign as damaging as any we have seen.

The pre-condition about violence should therefore be quietly shelved. This does not mean that 'violence has won'. It would simply show that the UK government won't be deflected in either direction; that violence can no more drive it away from negotiation than it could drive it to negotiate in the first place. Finding the terms of co-existence in the community is the central issue: if it is not feasible to find those terms at present, then violence should not be allowed to frighten people into negotiating for it; but equally, if there is a prospect of finding those common terms, then violence should not distract people from the merits of making the effort. If they give in either way, then violence will have won.

Yours sincerely,

SHELDON LEADER

Department of Law

University of Essex

Colchester

3 December