[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 80 (Wednesday, June 22, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 22, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                   DEADLY ATTACKS IN NORTHERN IRELAND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington [Mr. Foley] was recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FOLEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in genuine sorrow and anger to report 
a series of deadly attacks in Northern Ireland. Last Thursday, 
Protestant paramilitaries of the Ulster Freedom Fighters killed a 
Catholic shopkeeper in Belfast. That same day, the Irish National 
Liberation Army, which seeks to oust the British from Northern Ireland 
by force, murdered two Protestant workers and wounded two others in a 
drive-by shooting in Belfast. Then, on Friday, two more people were 
killed in retaliation--one Catholic, one Protestant--although it seems 
likely that the Protestant was mistaken for a Catholic coworker by his 
killers, who wanted to even Thursday's score.
  Finally, on Saturday, the Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant 
paramilitary group that wants to secure British rule, attacked and 
killed 6 Catholics, wounding 10. All were patrons of a pub and were 
cheering on the Irish national soccer team as it took on Italy in 
Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ.
  That there should be this tit-for-tat cycle of killings is not new. 
That there should be a rising number--and now a majority--of killings 
of Catholics by Protestant paramilitary groups is a disturbing 
phenomenon of the last year. That these attacks should occur, and with 
such bloody results, as all of Ireland and Britain await a statement by 
the Irish Republican Army concerning the British and Irish Governments' 
peace declaration cannot encourage optimism that the climate for 
peaceful dialog will exist if the IRA ever delivers such a response.
  Both governments have condemned these killings--calling them 
slaughter and savagery. So too do the vast majority of people in the 
North, regardless of confessional status, because they want more than 
anything else to see an end of such barbarism. The paramilitary groups, 
as is their custom, condemn killings by the other side, but not by 
their own. However horrific, this pattern of paramilitary violence 
seems too familiar, too predictable.
  Mr. Speaker, there is a way out of this death spiral that is choking 
the chance for peace. The IRA, the INLA, the UVF and all their violent 
progency must end the killing that never seems to diminish the resolve 
of those they seek to terrorize. They must return the fate of the North 
to its people, and to the choices they freely make at the ballot box. 
Both governments have issued--and clarified at length--guarantees that 
the people of the two parts of the island of Ireland alone will 
determine their relationships.
  Yet none of the efforts that have gone into the peace process, or 
which could be poured into it if given a chance, will have the 
slightest effect unless the men of violence acknowledge that the path 
they embrace has produced, not the victory they promise, but only the 
fervid and fatal aping of equally committed paramilitary groups of the 
opposite persuasion. Killings by one side begets only more killing by 
the other.
  When the IRA or UVF kills an invariably innocent bystander, their 
political cause is not advanced one iota. The carnage they cause only 
serves to harden the hearts of those they seek to coerce.
  Sir Patrick Mayhew, the British Secretary of State for Northern 
Ireland, visited the pub where the six were killed on Saturday. The 
horror of the crime was such that he suggested that the only 
explanation for their deaths one of the killers might give to his 
children would go something like this: ``I killed a man of 87. He was 
sitting with his back to me. He was watching the World Cup. I shot him 
dead.''
  Mr. Speaker, Solzhenitsyn, in describing Stalin's Gulag, said, 
``Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably 
intertwined with the lie.'' The big lie in Northern Ireland is that the 
brutality of the paramilitaries ever has or ever could bring peace to 
Northern Ireland. It can reap only what it sows. Reconciliation alone 
can bring peace to the North. Yet reconciliation is possible only when 
it is finally safe to watch a soccer match in your neighborhood pub 
with your back to the door.

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