Murder Most Foul

So the IRA are at it again. I know nothing about Brendan "Speedy" Fegan except what I've been reading in the newspapers over the past couple of days. He was a drug dealer. Based in Newry, he seems to have been strangely open about the fact that he was selling narcotics. He'd made a lot of money in a short space of time and flaunted it, reportedly buying a Mitsubishi Lancer for himself recently with £25,000 in cash. He was also, apparently, an informer of sorts, passing on titbits to both the RUC and the Gardaí—which may explain why he could engage in such public displays of criminal lavishness.

You'd have to wonder what makes a guy like "Speedy" Fegan tick. The fact that he was a sometime member of the Official Republican movement suggests that he can't have been entirely unfamiliar with the idea that violence is OK, that killing people is acceptable. So maybe he was capable of cold and calculated brutality himself. But it still seems quite mad, what he was up to—selling drugs openly and consorting with the police at the same time. You'd surmise that he must have had some kind of death wish—or perhaps he just backed himself into a corner and there was no way out that he could see. And so he decided to enjoy life while he could.

Not for long, with the murdering Provos around. Sometime in February they took their first pot at him, but he was wearing body armour and survived. Not this time. Two armed men walked into the Hermitage Bar in Newry at lunchtime on Sunday 9th May. Fegan was shot at close range in the body and the head and died instantly.

Now I've no doubt that Fegan was involved in some murky activities. It's been suggested that he had business links with the UDA, and that he also worked with the gang responsible for the murder of Veronica Guerin. He was also suspected of attempting to burn down the Sunday World offices in Belfast, having been a target of one of that paper's campaigns to identify criminal figures. Not the kind of guy who'd qualify for loveable rogue status, for sure, but no matter: there is still no justification whatsoever for the Provos' cold-blooded murder of him.

The killing of Fegan is only one in a series being carried out by the Provisional IRA. On a sliding scale of barbarity, others have arguably been more disproportionate, outrageous and self-serving, underlining the fact that there is something fundamentally corrupt and fascist at the heart of the ideology of armed-struggle republicanism. People may recall the appallingly brutal mob murder of the heroin addict Josie Dwyer in Dublin a couple of years back. Dwyer was crippled with HIV, and was close to being on his last legs anyway when he was set upon by a gang which included a coterie of "community" activists, and he was literally beaten to death. At the time I tried to think myself into the minds of those who were responsible for this particularly gruesome and visceral piece of viciousness, to imagine what they felt as they rained blows down on him, kicked him and beat him with cudgels and bars, and watched his frail and broken body crumple and die in front of them. But even to attempt to imagine this is to stare into the abyss; it is to be confronted with a level of unspeakable savagery that is impossible to comprehend.

There was a witness to the Dwyer murder. His friend Alan Byrne was with him and was apparently both willing and able to identify the guilty men in court. He was due to give evidence at the trial, which would almost certainly have seen some of the wonderful "community" activists responsible going down for a long stretch. But for reasons best known to themselves, the IRA wouldn't have it. They shot Alan Byrne last month—another hapless druggie blown into kingdom come by the bunch of murdering swine who like to style themselves freedom fighters. Which almost certainly means that the killers of Josie Dwyer will walk. Without Alan Byrne's evidence, it's unlikely that the State have a case.

Now you cannot be a member of Sinn Féin and evade the question: do we want to be associated with barbarism of this kind? Are we in league with a bunch of squalid, vicious murderers or are we not? The bombings, killings and other atrocities which litter the 30 years of war in the North were reprehensible and wrong—but I can see how the politics of the situation might have provided a twisted ideological justification for at least some of them.

But there is nothing that can even begin to explain away the murder of Josie Dwyer, and the murder of Alan Byrne; it is simply the lowest and most sickening kind of savagery in action, and it stinks to high heaven. Sinn Féin representatives are very good at accusing others of brutality and oppression. But where are their consciences when it comes to acts of such outstanding viciousness being perpetrated by their own?

I think we should be told.