Sinn Féin must face up to its past– then move on from it– if itw ants to be a nation-builder
INa powerful presentation to the MacGill Summer School last month, Sean Donlon, an eminent former diplomat and major contributor to the peace process in the North, spoke directly to Sinn Féin, urging it to do four things: “Take your seats in Westminster; re-establish the Stormont Executive; stop weaponising the Irish language; and tone down the commemorations”.
Mr Donlon’s exhortation about commemorations came to mind last week when a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to honour the memory of Confederate general Robert E Lee, ended in violence, as the people objecting to the ugly racism and anti-Semitism on display clashed with the marchers.
The fallout from Charlottesville continued all week with feelings inflamed by US President Donald Trump’s outbursts clearly implying a moral equivalence between the cause and behaviour of the marchers and those who stood against them.
In his authoritative history of Europe after World War II, ‘Postwar’, Tony Judt, dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust, says nation-building requires forgetting, putting the injustices of the past behind us. But, crucially, before we forget we must first remember truthfully, distinguishing right from wrong and not glossing over atrocities or commemorating them as glorious, heroic deeds.
An Africa-American historian commenting on the week’s events in the US said that this eruption of white supremacism was always going to happen, particularly after a scandal-free, black family had occupied the White House, because Americans have consistently air-brushed from their nation’s story the ethnic cleansing of the native American Indians and violent appropriation of their lands and the cruel enslavement of black people. She and other commentators expressed the hope that the widespread public and cross-party disapproval of the marchers and of Trump’s moral equivocation would expedite the accurate integration of these shameful chapters into the American story.
Unless historic evil is accurately remembered and transcended, it is likely to recur.
Air-brushing involves sanitising language and narrative. The rally in Charlottesville was a celebration of “our culture and heritage” and, as we all learned from John Wayne movies, “the West was won” by white settlers enduring awful hardship crossing deserts and prairies while fighting off attacks from marauding savages.
Here in Ireland, Sinn Féin has yet to depart from the big lie that the 30-year campaign of maiming, murder and bombing was a legitimate strategy in the noble cause of Irish freedom and unity and, therefore, that the men and women who committed these atrocities should be honoured, just like Robert E Lee.
Sinn Féin also uses deceitful language to legitimise and water down the sheer brutality of IRA actions. There were “legitimate targets”, like the unfortunate Patrick Gillespie who was strapped into a truck loaded with a bomb that exploded as he tried to escape on reaching an army check-point; he was deemed legitimate because he worked as a cook in an army barracks. As “combatants” in the “war”, the men and women who committed these crimes, like the men who murdered Garda Jerry McCabe in Adare, are lionised as heroes when released from jail.
Donald Trump’s defence that “there is blame on both sides” is repeatedly used by Sinn Féin, as seen in a recent ‘Reeling in the Years’ clip on RTÉ. Confronted by Garda McCabe’s wife Anne at a Sinn Féin fundraiser in New York, Gerry Adams replied from the podium, “I too have had relatives and friends killed”, as if there was a moral equivalence between the coldblooded murder of a garda while protecting a bank in the Republic and the death of IRA “active volunteers”.
Similar reasoning was applied at the unveiling by Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly in 2013 of a memorial plaque to IRA man Thomas Begley who died when his own bomb detonated in a fish shop on the Shankill Road in 2003, killing nine innocent shoppers. He was being commemorated because “he too was a victim”.
However complex and murky, there is right and wrong in these matters, as the mother of Heather Heyer, who was murdered by the driver who ploughed into the crowd protesting against the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, said in her denunciation of Trump’s “blame on both sides” equivocation.
There is no moral equivalence between the driver who killed innocent tourists in Barcelona and the Spanish police who killed five terrorists later in Cambrils. As for the victims, are we to view dead terrorists and dead tourists in the same light?
The present-day challenge to Sinn Féin is to face the ‘appalling vista’ that the IRA campaign was not part of a just war, but a campaign of terror waged for nearly three decades, not least against the Nationalist population.
It was prolonged for a generation after the existential threat experienced by Catholics and Nationalists at the start of the Troubles had passed, and when there was a peaceful alternative to achieve political objectives and
The present-day challenge to Sinn Féin is to face the ‘appalling vista’ that the IRA campaign was not part of a just war, but a campaign of terror, not least against the Nationalist population
vindication of human rights.
The consequence of Sinn Féin perpetuating the myth of an honourable “armed struggle” is it provides justification to the Real IRA and other ‘continuity’ factions who see Sinn Féin as having sold out and themselves as true keepers of the flame. Secondly, so long as it clings to this line, it creates an obstacle for other political parties to entering coalition government with it, which would be regrettable, given the ability and diligence of many of its TDs and senators.
Thirdly, there is the great irony that it holds back indefinitely its dream of ‘a nation once again’. Nation-building requires forgetting, but first comes the truth.