Mary Lou promised us a new Sinn Fein. How tragic for us all that she seems to be a prisoner of the past

IT’S easy to forget when you have no personal, residual grief just how horrific so many episodes were when you look back over the history of the Northern conflict. Every death impacted on a family, on a community, on a way of life. But there were some episodes that were so horrific, so brutal, that even decades later, they are still imprinted on the memory.

One such horror, from 30 years ago this week, is certainly still fresh in my mind.

March in 1988 was a dreadful month. First came the SAS shootings in Gibraltar leaving unarmed IRA members Mairéad Farrell, Daniel McCann and Seán Savage lying dead in the street. Then came the aftermath with the loyalist Michael Stone running rampage in Belfast’s Milltown cemetery on the day of their funerals, killing three of the mourners and injuring another 50.

Tortured

But it was at the funeral of one of the Milltown dead, Kevin Brady, on the following Saturday, that savagery really showed its true colours. In the form of what became known as the killing of ‘the corporals’.

That was when plain-clothed British soldiers, Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes found themselves in the midst of the Brady funeral procession before being dragged from their car, brutally beaten, stripped, tortured, stabbed and shot dead.

The veteran Observer and Irish Times journalist, the late Mary Holland who was covering the funeral, recalled hearing shots and then a young man casually saying as he passed her by: ‘Short and sweet. Good enough for him.’

She also recalled finding Fr Alec Reid bowed over the body of one of the men, still barely alive, giving him the kiss of life before administering the Last Rites. He sent her to call an ambulance. ‘His courage and compassion redeemed us all,’ she wrote.

On Monday night this week the BBC showed The Funeral Murders, a documentary that focused on those dreadful weeks in March 1988. Those on both sides of the ‘divide’ were interviewed. Some had ‘moved on’. Others clearly hadn’t.

On the same day as the documentary Mary Lou McDonald spoke out in response to the appalling behaviour of Sinn Féin senator Máire Devine who had retweeted a vile comment about Brian Stack, the prison officer shot by the IRA 35 years ago. Mr Stack died 18 months later from his injuries.

Ms Devine, one of the so-called new blood in Sinn Féin’s ranks, a woman with no dark links to the past, had made a ‘catastrophic error of judgment’ said her party leader. She had been suspended from all Sinn Féin party activities for a period of three months.

Three months? Was that it? Peadar Tóibín was suspended for six months back in 2013 because he voted with his conscience and against party policy in the Protection Of Life During Pregnancy Bill. Double the sanction of that handed down to Máire Devine, therefore, for something that impacted on the party itself, rather than a grievous wrong done to someone on the ‘outside’.

It was all supposed to be so different when Ms McDonald ascended to the Sinn Féin throne as president last month. She was a new broom, a person untainted by the past, a woman of substance who would plough her own furrow and be instrumental in moving Sinn Féin into proper parliamentary politics and away from its paramilitary past.

Kingsmill

And now what does she do? She gives Máire Devine a slap on the wrist, and it’s business as usual. Just as, when she was leader-designate back in January, she gave Northern MP Barry McElduff a similar three-month token sanction after his disgusting Kingsmill episode.

What happened to the brave new world? Perhaps it was, after all, only a mirage. Perhaps, indeed, the Mary Lou McDonald that we all thought we saw, with her middle-class background, her wonderful debating skills, her hail-fellow-well-met demeanour and her no-blood-on-myhands credentials was all simply a rather slick act.

Let’s allow the Barry McElduff episode to go for a moment. Ms McDonald was still not officially leader of the party at that point.

The first hint, however, of this being no more than same-old, same-old Sinn Féin actually came on the day of her election last month. ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá,’ she declared, fist aloft, from the podium. Yes, she was addressing a republican audience, as she said herself when subsequently defending her use of the phrase on the Late Late Show, going on to explain that for her, that phrase is about the future, not the past.

But couldn’t she have used an expression that was, as Ryan Tubridy so perfectly put it, ‘less sulphurous’?

Apparently not. And let’s not forget that that old IRA phrase was also accompanied with a triumphalist ‘Up the rebels!’ from the new Sinn Féin leader who also acknowledged in her opening address that she was very conscious that ‘I stand on the shoulders of giants’.

Opportunity

So that would be the likes of former Sinn Féin leader and IRA chief of staff Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and, of course, Gerry ‘I’ve-never-been-in-the-IRA’ Adams. Some giants.

Whether it is the case that the new Sinn Féin leader has been leading us all a merry dance and is, indeed, much more at home among the stalwarts of west Belfast than we ever thought or rather that she does not hold with that mindset but has neither the wherewithal nor the bottle to take a stand, it is difficult to judge.

Either way, however, Ms McDonald’s current approach is a disaster for the party when it comes to garnering votes outside of its predictable, longestablished party base.

More than one acquaintance of mine, admirers of many of Sinn Féin’s social policies and heartened by the Mary Lou McDonald they thought they saw over the past year, have since told me that her ‘tiocfaidh ár lá’ republican cant did it for them. ‘Back to poor oul’ Labour,’ one said to me with a sigh.

Deep down, what comes across from these recent episodes, from both old blood and new, is a sense that Sinn Féin are still fighting their war. That it’s a mindset that they simply can’t cast off.

And if that’s the mindset now, while they are in Opposition and still building the party, then how, you would have to ask, will they conduct themselves if they ever find themselves in government?

Ms McDonald has been presented with the opportunity to ring the changes within Sinn Féin. To move them away from the horror of the past. To erase forever the images that still flicker from long ago – the dead lying on the streets of Gibraltar, people blown to smithereens on a summer’s afternoon, two young men set upon by a mob, their bodies beaten and torn as if a savage animal had finally cornered its prey.

Ms McDonald has the chance to change all that. The worry however, is that when it comes to Sinn Féin, the long-ago words of that great American writer William Faulkner still ring true: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’