Former Provisional IRA volunteers Colm Lynagh (left) and  hunger striker Tommy McKearney in Monaghan Town.

Brexit will not lead to a return to bloodshed in Northern Ireland, says Provisional IRA veterans.

These are the views expressed by two former hard men of republicanism, interviewed by The Irish Times for their unique insights into the thorny issues of Brexit and Northern Ireland’s future.

They were active in some of the bloodiest campaigns of the Troubles, mainly along the partition Border which divides the Republic of Ireland from the 6 counties in the northeast.

Since June 2016, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union there has been much speculation about the risk to the Northern peace process. The fear that a hard Border along the UK’s only land frontier with the EU could stir tensions in Northern Ireland has focused minds not only in Belfast, Derry and Dublin but also in London and Brussels.

In initial papers filed last week both the British prime minister, Theresa May, and the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, referred to their desire to protect the peace process. May has said that the British do not want a return to the Border of old. Tusk has said that the EU will seek “flexible and creative solutions” to avoid a hard Border.

But these veterans of the Provisional IRA’s armed campaign, who are now critics of Sinn Féin policy, do not think that Brexit will derail the peace process. They see that threat as little more than a scare tactic to force the future of the 499km Border to the centre of the two-year Brexit negotiations.

Partition is going to become more obvious

“I think a lot of the concerns are exaggerated,” says Tommy McKearney, a former IRA volunteer originally from Moy, in Co Tyrone, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976.

“Certainly, I think we can rule out the idea of a hard Border with British troops on the Border. That was not to do with economics. That was a security situation. I don’t think we are going to see that again.”

McKearney, one of the 1980 IRA hunger strikers who went without food for 53 days, reflects on the unknown period with Brexit ahead.

Colm Lynagh, a fellow republican, served eight years, from 1982 to 1990, in Portlaoise Prison for republican activities.

The two men have a long personal history linked to a time and territory around the Border that witnessed some of the bloodiest episodes in the IRA insurrection against British rule in Ireland. Their brothers, Pádraig McKearney and Jim Lynagh, were among eight members of the IRA’s east Tyrone brigade killed by the SAS during an attack on an RUC station in the Protestant village of Loughgall, in Co Tyrone, in May 1987. It was the biggest single loss of life for the republican movement during the conflict.

Two more McKearney brothers died in the Troubles. Tommy’s older brother Sean was killed in May 1974 when a bomb he was planting at a petrol station outside Dungannon exploded prematurely.

Another brother, Kevin, and Tommy’s uncle John, neither of whom was in the IRA, were killed by loyalist paramilitaries from the Ulster Volunteer Force in an attack on the family’s butcher’s shop, in Moy, in January 1992.

While Brexit raises uncertainty around how the UK manages trade across a frontier running through those former battlefields, McKearney and Lynagh believe that the climate and conditions,  the anti-Catholic discrimination and economic inequality that ignited the Troubles no longer exist.

Even a few customs posts stopping HGVs crossing the Border would not change that, McKearney says. He considers threats of a return of the British army to Border towns like Aughnacloy as:

“A cheap shot” and the recent “pantomime” of mock Border checkpoints and anti-Brexit protesters dressing up in customs-officer uniforms as “the hysterical interpretation of what may happen”.

“There is very, very little appetite among republican circles in the North for a resumption of any armed campaign. Why would article 50 change that?” 

“The reality of it is that after 25 years of armed conflict there is less possibility of an armed campaign of any significance. There will always be a handful of people, but there is nothing can be done about that in any society. But as a community willing to return to armed conflict, there just isn’t an appetite for that.”

Lynagh adds,

“There is a vested interest in hyping up the political impact and the scare tactics that it is going to open a hornet’s nest of dissident activity against British rule. I don’t see that.”

McKearney and Lynagh are dissenters, not dissidents; although they support the peace process they object to the policies pursued by Sinn Féin and some of their former comrades who moved into politics.

Lynagh is irked by the way political parties in the Brexit debate are portraying people in the Border counties as lawless Irish, similar to the people of Pakistan’s tribal areas, with a pathological predisposition to violence:

"Who will rush out and go to war again because they can’t stand the sight of customs posts”.

Info from various sources including the Irish Times