|
Andrew Kearney was out drinking one night in July when he got into a quarrel over a game of cards. He suspected someone of cheating. He called the man outside to settle the difference, and knocked him down. As he left for home, he was told he had better lookout for himself.
He worried over the next days. After two weeks, when he was playing one night in his flat in the nationalist New Lodge area of Belfast with his two-week child by his common-law wife, seven men and a woman, all masked, burst in. They took him out along the hallway to the lift, and fired into him. Most of the shots were to his legs, and maybe they meant to cripple him. But the trauma of the shots from the high-velocity weapons and the loss of blood he suffered in the long time it took to get a doctor to the estate killed him.
Those who shot him were not loyalists; it would be a rare loyalist gang that would dare to penetrate so deeply into an area known for its hard republicanism and so dominated by the IRA. The man that Kearney had knocked over, who cannot be named, was a senior officer of the Northern Belfast division of the IRA, as Kearney, from a strongly republican family, knew well. That was the basis of his concern in the two weeks between the fight and his murder. The official could not be seen to be beaten; he had to have the last word.
Over the past few months murders, tortures, punishment beatings and exiles (giving people a warning to leave Ireland within a certaln time or be killed) have increased markedly in Northern Ireland. In the Markets area of Belfast, a 17-year-old lad in a burst of bravado told an IRA enforcer who hustled him out of the way to 'fuck off'. Later that day, he was told to be on the street at a place and time the following evening; he was then picked up, driven around in a car for half an hour while being beaten, then was taken to waste ground and shot through both ankles. An 18 year old who had been dealing drugs for the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) accumulated debts of £2,500 to the organisation which he could not repay and fled to England. The UDA called on his mother and told him he must come back and continue to deal to pay off his debt or he would be killed.
The known incidents -many will not be reported -are roughly equally split between republican and loyalist gangs. In all, there have been over 450 in the past six months. When this figure was put to Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the House of Commons last week, she agreed with it. Later during Northern Irish questions, she said that the ceasefires agreed by the paramilitaries still held.
In these answers, Mowlam captured one of the greatest moral hazards to the Good Friday Agreement: Its achievement has seen the Unionist leader, David Trimble, and the nationalist leader, John Hume, receive Nobel peace prizes this week. Yet at the same time anxiety that it was in crisis prompted a Tory-sponsored debate in the Com
|
|
