The Mad Bombers of the IRA : Even Dubliners can’t muster much sympathy for the latest detonation of carnage

“He was a great kid,” said a grieving Colin Parry of his son Tim, dead at 12 because of a terrorist bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army. As for the IRA, the Briton said, “I really got no words for them at all.”

We do.

Can there any longer be even a scintilla of doubt about the true nature of the IRA?

These are not freedom fighters but freedom destroyers. They are not heroes but cowards. They do not serve the cause of justice for Irish Catholics but instead work to undermine that cause and reduce sympathy for the plight of the Irish minority in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland.

They go about their mad bombing with absolutely no regard for innocent human life. In recent years a particular delight has been taken in planting bombs that will kill civilians who just happen to be around when the explosives detonate.

Weekend before last, two bombs planted by the IRA went off in succession outside a retail store in a town not far from Liverpool. It was a calculated effort to maximize casualties. The devices wounded 56 people, many of them seriously, and killed Tim Parry and a 3-year-old boy.

That heinous and callous act outraged not only Britons, many of them wearily accustomed to such barbarism, but even Dubliners, ordinarily sympathetic to Northern Catholics’ complaints about Protestant repression there. Thousands of Irish men and women have demonstrated in a quiet protest; Irish children offered teddy bears and stuffed Snoopy toys for the funeral of the two boys in England.

Combined with gruesome terrorist acts against Catholics by groups such as the Ulster Freedom Fighters, there is no end in sight to the insanity. The British government continues its frustrating and sometimes contradictory policy of repressive army policing in the north and multilateral negotiations with Belfast and Dublin. Though undertaken in good faith, these talks have not gotten far, and the army presence, while justifiable, is no long-term solution.

During the presidential campaign Bill Clinton vaguely suggested sending a U.S. envoy to the talks in an effort to help. To that, the British raised polite but querulous eyebrows; since taking office, the Clinton Administration has not formally offered an envoy, suggesting that yet another campaign promise has been quietly forgotten.

But the idea of a special envoy has possible merit, if handled sensitively. Indeed, how could it hurt? This appears to be precisely the position of the Irish government in Dublin: Why not try?