US Edition Gareth O'Connor is dead, secretly murdered by the IRA earlier this year, his body buried somewhere along the Irish border. But hush, don't mention the war, and say not a word of Gareth O'Connor. The delinquencies of the peace process must not be adverted to in public, as Sinn Fein-IRA is allowed to hold on to its armouries of guns and double standards.
Of course, Gareth O'Connor (RIP) should be deeply embarrassing to the republican leadership, for his fate testifies to the a la carte manner in which Sinn Fein-IRA follows the rules of the peace process. But instead, they've got away it with it, as usual: Colombia, the Castlereagh break-in, the Stormont intelligence operation against the British, Irish and US governments, the many arms importations, the punishment beatings, the occasional murder, have occurred since the Good Friday Agreement, and all without any political consequence for Sinn Fein.
Is it surprising that the Shinners felt free to kill and bury O'Connor, a dissident republican, not far from where Irish police are now looking for the body of Colomba McVeigh, abducted and murdered by the IRA 28 years ago? The Shinners pay no price for their numerous breaches of the Good Friday Agreement, because it is apparently accepted that burying bodies is what they do. Indeed, in their own quiet, understated way, that's what they've always done.
In the Troubles of 1919-22, unknown numbers of men vanished off the face of the earth, courtesy of the IRA, many being buried secretly. Two captured police officers were dealt with in another way: they were thrown alive into a gas furnace in Tralee in Kerry. In the summer of 1922, the IRA openly abducted three Cork Protestants, Captain Herbert Woods MC, MM; his father-in-law, Thomas Hornibrooke; and his brother-in-law Samuel Hornibrooke, and tortured and murdered them before secretly burying them.
Not a single Irish newspaper reported on the fate of these men until I did in a column in The Irish Times in 1989. Indeed, it could be said that I have a certain proprietorial interest in the missing of the Troubles. I suspect that it was an article of mine in The Spectator in the early 1990s that first drew the British public's attention to the missing of the more recent Troubles.
No doubt, the Shinners would prefer the press not to refer to these little house-cleaning operations; but as it turns out, no one seems to object very much, apart from the families, of course, and a few journalists, and they can be safely ignored. So the Shinners got away with the secret murder of Jean McConville in 1972, and the man who ordered her abduction and burial these days regularly takes tea in Downing Street. Moreover, the various governments in Dublin, London and Washington can usually be relied on to give an indulgent, boys-will-be-boys wink every time the Shinners break the rules.
Sometimes Sinn Fein leaders are asked in the course of television interviews about the Disappeared (a convenient short-hand for the abducted, tortured, murdered and buried). Their faces immediately become grave, and they urge that this is a matter of great sensitivity, that there's no point in endlessly raking over the coals, and now is the time for "closure" (Shinnese for the total amnesia which consumed the Woods and the Hornibrookes).
Mention, however, Bloody Sunday, or military collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, and suddenly it's not closure that the Shinners want but disclosure, and wide-ranging, endless inquiries. But then move on to "Stakeknife", the British agent at the heart of the IRA, and the talk is again of sensitivity, of drawing a line, of not pointlessly going back into history.
But why shouldn't the Shinners talk like this? No one in government ever reproves them for their numerous departures from intellectual or moral consistency: indeed Shinner leaders are probably able to swan into Downing Street with their own personal swipe-cards, courtesy of MI5. And because no one in the three governments participating in this morally-depraved peace process ever publicly announces that Shinners must stay within the law - oh and by the way, no more killing and burying people - they never really understand the rules which the rest of us live by.
So the Sinn Fein candidate for the next European elections, Mary Lou McDonald, recently gave the keynote speech at a memorial in Dublin to the IRA-man Sean Russell. This quisling died - in agony, I trust - on a U-boat in 1940 on his way to Ireland to help set up a Nazi puppet state. Yet the Shinners have so little understanding of European values that they think their candidate for the European Parliament can openly revere a pro-Nazi, simply because he was a Shinner.
The political cultures of both islands have been so corrupted by concessions to the Shinners that half the IRA Army Council is now elected to parliament in either Dublin or London. Heaven knows, maybe the Lords beckon next for some of their leaders. For their coat of arms, might I suggest a pair of crossed spades?