This is the final of three guest posts by Henry McDonald, who has covered Irish politics for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, examining the flaws in the frequently-drawn comparison between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Islamist terror groups like Hamas. The posts are drawn from the final chapter of Henry’s recent book, Gunsmoke and Mirrors - How Sinn Fein Dressed up Defeat as Victory, available here. You can now read the entire piece or download a handy PDF version over on the main Z Word site.

The narrative of the Irish peace process suggests a leadership driven by entirely practical concerns, willing when necessary to dump old ideological certainties in the pursuit of limited goals. Dissidents jibe that Sinn Fein’s entry into and embrace of the parliament at Stormont would be akin in the Middle East to Hamas entering the Knesset. In that at least the dissidents have a point.

But even the most militant dissident Irish republican while admiring of Hamas and Hezbollah’s obduracy has not resorted to one of their principal tactics - suicide murders. In the period before, during and after the Good Friday Agreement was signed there were plenty of bombs detonated aimed at undermining support for Trimbleite-unionism in the same way as Hamas and Islamic Jihad tried (and were arguably successful) to erode Israeli public support for the Oslo peace process. However, even after the breakaway Real IRA caused such carnage at Omagh the dissidents immediately stepped back from the brink and declared their own cessations of violence. In addition the Real IRA didn’t deliberately set out to kill civilians including women and children. Their operatives botched the placing of the car bomb in the town centre and failed to give an adequate warning. Clearly the Real IRA, just as the Provisionals had done before them, recklessly put civilians at risk in their bid to kill members of the security forces and cause massive economic damager. There is though a clear difference between the Irish republican dissident’s lethal carelessness and the deliberate targeting of pizza parlours, discos and even Irish bars in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where the operative (the suicide-murderer) knows he is going to kill men, women and children.

Leaving aside the absence of the suicide-bomb in the Real IRA and Continuity IRA’s arsenals both organisations could, if they only get lucky once, detonate bombs that could in an instant shake the political institutions up at Stormont to their foundations. They could mimic that other barbaric strategy of the Sunni Jihadists and ex-Baathists in Iraq who have bombed Shia mosques and districts in order to foment outright sectarian civil war. RIRA, CIRA and any other faction to emerge in the near future could follow suit and indiscriminately bomb Protestant heartlands.

But they chose not to do so partly to pay lip service to Wolfe Tone’s original definition of Irish republicanism and in the main because they know deep down the disaster they would be bringing down not only on themselves but also the community from which they come. The parallels therefore between the rejectionist republican and the Islamic militants of all hues, Shia and Sunni, are entirely illusory.

Given the frequent exposures of informers, agents and spies inside the Provisionals it has become blindingly obvious that the British had a deep insight into the direction sections of the IRA leadership, most critically its Belfast based commanders, wished the organisation to travel. They encouraged, persuaded and if Brian Nelson, the British Army’s spy inside the UDA, is correct also ensured certain republican leaders like Gerry Adams stayed where they were in the long terms interests of a peaceful settlement. By contrast no single figure like Adams appears to be emerging, or is likely to emerge, from inside say Hamas that can tilt the Islamist movement away from its all-or-nothing ideology.

The-fallacy-of-the-Good-Example even applies to less extreme conflicts such as the struggle between the Spanish State and the Basque terrorists of ETA. Although ETA’s ‘war’ has lasted longer than the Provisional IRA’s it has not only claimed less lives (under 900 victims) the Basque separatist organisation has underwent almost double the number of splits and schisms than republicanism over the last forty years.

There have been aborted attempts to push ETA and Madrid towards negotiations and have involved the likes of Fr Alec Reid, one of the two Clonard priests that played such a critical role in helping Adams reverse the Provisionals out of the armed struggle cul de sac. Once again however there is a crucial difference in the quality of leadership. So far the present ETA leadership has proved as intractable and ideologically rigid as those in charge of Republican Sinn Fein or those allied to the Real IRA. If ETA and its political wing followed mainstream Sinn Fein’s example then they would have to settle for what is already been on offer since the 1978 post-Franco constitution: devolved autonomy but within the Spanish State. This is essentially what the Good Friday Agreement and later the deal at St.Andrews resulted in.

So for ETA to accept its equivalent on the Iberian Peninsula, a GFA-style settlement would be tantamount to total surrender. Given the nihilism of ETA’s seemingly endless violent campaign as witnessed in the cold blooded murder of a former Spanish Socialist Party in the Basque region just prior to the 2008 General Election there appears to be no evidence that realism is dawning among the Etarras (militants). As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century it appears that ETA still have evidently learned nothing from the Irish peace process.

One of the process’ mini-growth industries over the last decade has been the travelling caravan of ex-paramilitaries, both loyalist and republican, alongside politicians who have visited almost every other conflict zone on the planet since the cease-fires were declared. They have journeyed from Israel/Palestine to South Africa, Latin America to Sri Lanka. In each unresolved region of discord the local warring parties have sought out advice and succour of some of the key protagonists of Ireland’s ‘war.’

Former enemies such as the late David Ervine and Martin McGuinness have travelled to both the disputed Jaffna peninsula and to Israel-Palestine where they relayed their experiences on how to shot down conflict and de-activate underground armies. They went there no doubt because they genuinely believed they could do some good. Perhaps they might succeed somehow.

In arguably the most dangerous of any of those conflict zones, Iraq, the advice of another major actor in Northern Ireland has been sought out for advice - the British government and its security forces. Representatives of the Iraqi government in 2007 were fascinated to learn from PSNI officers training and liaising with local police in Basra and Baghdad that the British State had constructed and paid for a crude mechanism to dramatically reduce sectarian slaughter - the building of the gloriously misnamed ‘peace walls’ separating Protestant and Catholic areas particularly in Belfast. PSNI officers returning from Iraq later remarked that the Iraqi authorities were embarking on a series of similar walled barriers which would ‘protect’ rival Sunni and Shia areas from one and other.

The other ‘authorities’ in Iraq, namely the Americans, also realised they had something to learn from how Britain slowly but surely defeated the ‘armed struggle.’ As Mary Ann Clancy pointed out in her survey of the Bush Administration’s attitude to Northern Ireland, the Americans were fascinated by Britain secret war against the IRA. In those U.S. State Department and White House officials who spoke to Clancy appeared far more interested in Britain’s use of informants inside the IRA and externally the promotion of potential peace faction within the republican movement than in the nurturing of all encompassing political dialogue between the warring parties. The only ‘good example’ the Americans saw from the Northern Ireland conflict was the one that Britain used to close down the IRA’s armed campaign. The Americans at least had seen through the smoke and mirrors of the Irish peace process and the polite fiction that the final outcome had been some sort of honourable draw.