Noel Doran: How the horrors of 9/11 paved the way for decommissioning

THE world changed forever through the 9/11 catastrophes in the United States, 25 years ago this Friday, with the full scale of the consequences still unfolding internationally and impossible to finally calculate. While almost 3,000 people died almost immediately in the devastation after four airliners were hijacked by the extremist Muslim group al-Qaeda, detailed academic studies suggest that the number of fatalities recorded during the subsequent conflicts as part of what the US administration defined as a global war on terror is approaching five million. It remains difficult to convey the sense of disbelief on September 11 2001 as it began to emerge that US territory was under serious and coordinated attack effectively for the first time since the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii six decades previously. Early media reports that a plane of unspecified size had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York seemed to indicate a tragic accident until the South Tower was identically targeted just over 15 minutes later, and two more passenger jets then crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, within an hour. Ireland was obviously on the periphery of those appalling developments initially but, with Stormont's devolved structures going through a particularly fraught phase, significant repercussions were felt here within a short period of time. The Good Friday Agreement, signed in April 1998, introduced the cross-community institutions, and included the specific provision that all parties would use their influence to achieve the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons within two years. This may not have been a completely realistic schedule, but removing the arms held by proscribed organisations on both sides of the divide was always a crucial aspect of the wider peace deal, and before 9/11 progress had become painfully slow. There were accusations of bad faith in all directions, with republicans claiming that the British government had watered down proposed policing reforms, and failed to withdraw its troops as swiftly as anticipated, while unionists highlighted what they regarded as firm evidence of continuing IRA activity in breach of its ceasefire. Although what was often described as creative ambiguity surrounded these and other discussions, many observers in the summer of 2001 were speculating that power-sharing was on the brink of a permanent collapse. Tension had mounted steadily on the streets since loyalists launched a picket of Holy Cross primary school for girls in north Belfast in June, which escalated rapidly into daily sectarian intimidation and violence. The Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) struggled to obtain the cooperation it sought from illegal groups, leading to the resignation of the Ulster Unionist David Trimble as first minister in July. It was a growing political and security crisis, with graffiti on gable ends in nationalist districts of the city and elsewhere rejecting any moves over ammunition and explosives through the blunt message 'not a bullet, not an ounce'. When a group of prominent republicans who became known as the Colombia Three were arrested at Bogota international airport on August 11, while travelling on false passports, and accused of training the FARC rebels in the country, we moved into even more dangerous territory. The task of The Irish News, where I was then the editor, was to examine all this in the light of the US carnage and try to suggest a way ahead, which we did through our full-page editorial of September 13, under the headline 'A different mood will face those who favour violence'. We were the first newspaper in Ireland to directly declare, post 9/11, that a new era had arrived in which the decommissioning issue would have to be resolved by both republicans and loyalists as a matter of urgency. The tone of the exchanges in any event began to change rapidly as a range of key voices accepted that enough talking had taken place on the question of putting arms beyond use, and firm action was required without delay. Engagements between republicans and the IICD intensified beyond recognition, and on October 23, remarkably only six weeks after 9/11, the IRA made the announcement that the supervised decommissioning of weapons was finally under way. It inevitably proved to be a long and complex process, with the response of republicans and loyalists having varying degrees of credibility over the years, but we are undoubtedly in a much better place today than we were a quarter of a century ago. Stormont has largely managed to stagger on, through all its various upheavals, and the debate over whether it is still actually worth saving in 2026 can wait until another day, but for now, at an entirely different level, it is more important to reflect on the innocent lives which were lost both in the US and everywhere else as a result of 9/11. n.doran@irishnews.com