Steyn on the IRA

Mark Steyn notes that the McCartneys, not Gerry Adams, will be spending St. Patrick's Day in the White House and takes off from there to discuss the current state of the IRA and what it means. He writes:

Blowing up grannies and schoolkids at bus stops is always wrong, and the misty shamrock-hued sentimentalization of it in this particular manifestation speaks poorly for America, the principal source for decades of IRA funding. On the other hand, it was the London and Dublin governments, not Washington, that decided they were going to accommodate the IRA, Her Majesty's government going so far at one point as to install Gerry Adams and his colleagues in the coalition administration of Northern Ireland, making IRA terrorists ministers of a crown they don't even deign to recognize.

Now Tony Blair & Co. profess to be shocked to discover that the leopard hasn't changed his spots. But, until January, if you raised the IRA's vicious methods of retribution against dissident Catholics, British officials would chortle urbanely and assure you it was just a little ''internal housekeeping'' by Adams and his chums.

So London and Dublin have only themselves to blame for the present situation. By enhancing the prestige of the terrorists, they've enabled Sinn Fein to supplant moderate Catholic political parties in both Northern and Southern Ireland. Because they no longer have to engage in the costly and time-consuming business of waging war against the British Army, they've been free to convert themselves into the emerald isle's answer to the Russian Mafia. They recently pulled off the biggest bank heist in British history -- snaffling just shy of 50 million bucks from the vaults of Ulster's Northern Bank. What do they need that money for? Well, it helps them fund their real objective: the takeover of southern Ireland.

Read the whole thing here:

Steyn, of course, is right. All too many commentators have tried to shift blame for the IRA atrocities onto diaspora communities -- specifically Irish-America [another example of the "blame America first" syndrome], but London and Dublin are the real problem. Yes, the funding must be cut off, and the McCartney affair will go a long way toward doing that, but the tolerance of terrorism must end too. It's time for a crackdown on terrorism at home as well as abroad.