David McKittrick: What Spain can learn from the Irish experience

Condemning the IRA and excluding Sinn Fein hurt them but never looked like beating them

Most of those who conceived and put together the Irish peace process instinctively believe that the Spanish government may be making a big mistake in outlawing Batasuna, the political wing of Eta.

This is a tentative judgement, given that no two situations are ever exactly alike; given, too, that there are few absolutes in this supremely difficult territory of how to deal with a violent minority. The Irish experience is that the IRA was able to keep going, and keep killing, for decades. Security measures contained it but did not defeat it. Condemning it and excluding it certainly hurt it but never looked like beating it. The killing in Northern Ireland fell drastically only when the principle of inclusivity took hold. Basically, the bad guys were offered a door into society, which most, though not all, have taken.

Such a course gives rise to a whole swathe of new problems, but most of these are political rather than security matters and can thus be addressed without people dying. The process is not perfect but, despite recurring riots, there is measurable progress.

The search for a security solution went on for decades, the authorities struggling against the IRA while attempting to swat its political wing, Sinn Fein, with measures such as a broadcasting ban.The problem was the durability of Sinn Fein, which, like Batasuna, continued to register an appreciable amount of electoral support. Its very existence made the point that the security problem had a strong political dimension.

The thought that tens of thousands of people would turn out and vote for Sinn Fein even as the IRA killed people was unpalatable to the authorities and almost everyone else. But that vote could not be ignored, especially when Gerry Adams was elected to Westminster. For one thing, groups like the IRA and Eta can be skilled at presenting themselves as victims, even as their activists claim their own victims. For another, the continuing violence builds up a pantheon of martyrs whose potent memory helps attract new blood.

In the closed world of these organisations, thought processes can be startlingly selective. Much of Spain may be mourning the the six-year-old girl recently killed by an Eta bomb, but Eta itself dwells instead on its woman member killed by her own bomb a year ago. The more closed the world, the more introspective those who live there tend to be. Those inside create a hierarchy of victimhood, elevating their own casualties and blotting out the memory of those killed by their people. The woman is venerated, the child quietly forgotten.

It also seems inevitable that, during a protracted conflict, the security authorities will succumb to the temptation to cut corners and indulge in illegal tactics. This has already happened in Spain with its dirty war. Most now accept that it happened in Northern Ireland too, though probably to a lesser degree, in cases such as the killing of solicitor Pat Finucane. Such deviations shift governments off the moral high ground and help the cause of violent organisations.

The banning of Batasuna can add an element of political martyrdom. Eta and Batasuna, it is said, show no sign of wishing to enter conventional politics or calling another ceasefire, so banning the party is not endangering any potentially valuable evolution.

This point needs to be examined with particular care. Thousands of Spanish police, security and intelligence operatives are pitted against Eta, just as thousands of British personnel battled against the IRA. While the security people have their successes, the fact that both conflicts have endured for more than three decades is incontestable evidence that there is much they do not know. This seems particularly true when a secret movement begins to change its political thinking.

It is hardly likely that its leaders would suddenly stop thinking of bombs and start thinking purely politically. Instead, they enter a tricky transitional period, in the first instance thinking of how to combine violence and politics. Hopefully they eventually move on to contemplate a gun-free future.

In the Northern Ireland case, most of the formidable security apparatus missed the significance of the very early days of the peace process. Only a few, notably Peter Brooke, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and a few key MI5 people had a sense of new opportunities opening up.

This was partly because a fledgling peace process develops not in peace but to the accompaniment of violence on the streets, perhaps increased violence. It is tragic but true that an organisation moving towards ceasefire tends to step up its activities in the hope of strengthening its eventual negotiating position. Such an organisation also tends to step up its defiant rhetoric, thus providing a mixture of bombs and bombast that can confuse many observers.

The Spanish make much of Batasuna's refusal to condemn Eta killings, yet this has not proved crucial in Ireland. To this day, senior Sinn Fein politicians still have trouble in condemning violence, whether committed by the IRA or by others. Outright condemnation poses problems for republicans in that it may be seen as an implicit admission that the entire IRA campaign was wrong. They point instead to the IRA's other actions, such as the decommissioning of weaponry and its recent apology for the killing of civilians.

A one-time Sinn Fein buzzword was "demonisation" – the British government, it would complain, was trying to freeze out the republican community. Yet even in the toughest years of the troubles, as the IRA killed soldiers and the SAS killed IRA men, discreet lines of communication were kept open. A back-channel, as it was called, conveyed messages from the leadership of the IRA to Downing Street, and vice-versa. The two sides distrusted each other but still felt that keeping in touch was worthwhile.

The evolution in communications since those furtive times is remarkable, with Adams and Martin McGuinness in regular personal contact with Tony Blair. When McGuinness became a grandfather, the Prime Minister warmly shook his hand and later wrote him a message of congratulations. The Spanish government's action is on an emotional level understandable, as Eta's futile bombings go on. But the Irish lesson is that the authorities must, whatever the provocations, patiently keep looking for signs of movement and flexibility. The strategy of attempting to anathematise the republican community did not work: it was too large, had too strong a tradition and had too much pride. In Spain as in Ireland, it is hardly likely that such a community will simply give in.

The lesson learnt in Belfast, painfully slowly after so many years in which so many other tactics were tried, was that an outlaw community preferred to remain outlawed and to remain associated with violence, if the alternative was simply ignominious surrender. In Belfast the sense developed that everyone had to be given an honourable way out, a means of exiting from the troubles with dignity and the possibility of entry into politics and the wider society.

In recent years republicans have mixed much more than they ever did before, becoming much more exposed to the outside world and broadening their horizons. While Spain goes in the opposite direction, Irish republicanism is becoming less and less of a closed world.