reply to Eamonn McCann

In his column in the Belfast Telegraph Eamonn McCann takes us back to the killing of two soldiers at Masserine barracks and reminds us that, shortly before, the SSR, a special reconnaissance regiment closely associated with the shoot to kill policy and the death squads, was deployed in the North, breaking the deal A step too far

My thanks to Eamonn McCann for his thoughts on the revival of physical force republicanism. In my view he goes too far to accommodate the moral panic and, in the process, clarifies the issues.

on policing and provoking Provo outrage.

Eamonn argues that a political movement against this deployment were sabotaged by the militarists and forced the Provos to move quickly to unconditional support for the state forces.

That's nonsense. As Eamonn himself has argued in the past, armed actions speed up things that are already in the pipeline. The Provos capitulated on the issue of the SRR just as they capitulated on all the other shifts needed to placate the British and the unionists.

By carrying the argument too far, Eamonn contradicts himself and gives the physical force tradition the power to trump politics - a power he denies that it has.

He does one other useful thing. He reminds us of the mailed fist, the shadowy forces of the British military in the background.

They haven't gone away y'know.