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government of the whole island of Ireland.'
Among those who warn that the Agreement is now being undermined by the continuing violence of terrorists who had 'renounced terrorism' is Vincent McKenna, who helps run an organisation called Families Against Intimidation and Terror.
McKenna, with the director Sam Cushnahan, are in a strange situation; they do what police forces should do, in that they provide a port of call for men and women who have been or are about to be dealt with by criminals. Yet the facts of life in Northern Ireland mean that many of these men and women, especially but not exclusively on the republican side, cannot or will not go to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
McKenna is a former IRA man, who left the organisation in 1991 because he was 'sick of the lies and the hypocrisy'. He worked as an intelligence officer, which meant that he set people up for assassination -and one day found himself setting up an RUC man whose family lived a few yards from his (he had been brought up in a largely Protestant area) and whose brother had just been killed in a traffic accident. He could not do it; nor could he stop it. One day, he went into a bar where the RUC man was drinking, wrote his car number and route to work on a cigarette packet together with the sentence, 'you have 14 days to get out'. Now out of the organisation, he hates the violence but does not seem to fear it. He was beaten up, he says, in September by half a dozen IRA enforcers when he insisted on conducting surveys among the Catholic population of the Lower Ormeau Road which showed that most would be indifferent to Orange parades through their areas so long as they were not triumphalist in nature - quite different to the view, which the IRA insisted was unanimous, that the Catholics regarded it as an outrage.
A year after he joined the IRA in 1981 one of his commanders told him: 'We get our respect from one thing and one thing only through fear. Don't forget it.' McKenna, who with Cushnahan came to London last week to brief MPs on the growing violence, believes that the defacto position of the British government that the ceasefires remain 'in place' so long as the paramilitaries only terrorise their own -is now eroding all respect for the Agreement. He says: 'God forgive Mo Mowlam. She went on Ulster TV and thanked Gerry Adams for disciplining the Real IRA after they planted the bomb at Omagh (which killed 28 people). Gerry Adams would have cared not a thing for this, but it killed some of his own supporters. The IRA let the Real IRA take the explosives needed for that job. Gerry Adams is saying to Mowlam: 'Look, you deal with me, or this is what you'll get'.'
The dilemma -as the Labour MP Harry Barnes put it in the Commons debate on Wednesday -is whether one believes the IRA has made a tactical or a strategic cease-fire. The latter means that violence has been renounced, and that local officials
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