IRA Terrorist Gets Less Than He Deserved By Andrew L. Jaffee, August 8, 2003	Home   Search   Forum   Terms

On May 21, 1998, 95% of voters in the Republic of Ireland and 71.2% of voters in Northern Ireland approved the landmark "Good Friday Agreement" (text), which began a search for a final peace settlement mainly between Protestant Unionists loyal to the U.K. and Catholics loyal to Ireland.

There is no doubt that the Northern Ireland peace process has been "gruelling." However, it has started a political process including the establishment of an elected Assembly for the North, prisoner releases, disarming paramilitary groups on both sides, and a commitment from both the British and Irish governments to see the process through to the end. (Click to read a timeline and a good overview of the peace process. Click for a detailed history of the political process.)

But for some of Ireland's terrorists, the decision/vote of the Irish people for peace was meaningless. According to the Economist:

FOUR months after the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 set Northern Ireland on the path to a peaceful settlement of its conflict, a bunch of dissidents, who had broken away from the IRA in anger at its participation in the peace process, committed the worst atrocity in the province’s 30-year "Troubles". The 500lb car bomb the group set off in the centre of Omagh on a busy Saturday afternoon killed 29 people (including a woman pregnant with twins) and injured more than 200.

Did these "dissidents" (thugs)--calling themselves the "Real IRA"--know better? Were they "elected" to slaughter their own people? No and no. Do they remind you of anyone? Maybe Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, or PFLP? To all these terrorists, nothing matters more than their own "causes" and the power those causes give them.

Yesterday, some sense of justice finally came for the survivors of the Omagh bombing:

Dissident republican Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt has been sentenced to 20 years in prison, a day after he was convicted for directing terrorism, a court official said.

The sentence was less than the possible maximum of life imprisonment set under a law in the Republic of Ireland that followed a 1998 bomb attack by the Real IRA in Omagh...

McKevitt, 53, was the first person ever to be convicted in Ireland of directing terrorism, an offence created in the wake of the Omagh bombing.

He appeared in Dublin's Special Criminal Court on Thursday, after refusing the day before to leave his cell.

The Real IRA leader's trial

...came to a speedy end last month after McKevitt sacked his legal team, denouncing the proceedings as a "political show trial".

Of course, he knows better, right? (Click for more details.) Tell that to the victims of the Real IRA. According to the BBC:

Speaking after the sentence was handed down, Stanley McCombe, whose wife, Anne, was among those killed at Omagh, said the sentence "does ease the pain a bit" but not much.

He told BBC News 24: "We've had our life sentences. There's no remission for us".

And the "dissidents" haven't given up. Now they're threatening one of their old compadres, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, for participating in a political process. (Click for an analysis of Irish terrorists.)