SF should put tackling poverty before hopes of a united Ireland
■ As he bows out of the leadership of Sinn Féin, I remain curious about where Gerry Adams stands in relation to the future of Ireland.
What gets in the way of reliable understanding of the man is the beard. I often long to peel it back to see what that mask-like facial covering conceals. Mr Adams is enigmatic to the core. If only he would face the question Christ posed to his closest followers, “Who do they [the people] think I am?” A likely response would be, “some say a war monger, others a man of peace”. However, Mr Adams is not a keen enthusiast of self-disclosure, having once suggested one man’s transparency is another man’s humiliation.
Perhaps, Duncan, in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, gets it right when he suggests, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”. Mr Adams is mainly a self-consumer of the deliverances of his own mind, a private man, hitting the public world through the activities of others, particularly the IRA. It is here the thoughts of Mr Adams become increasingly elusive and ambiguous.
What Mr Adams has achieved, through Sinn Féin, is filling the vacuum created by the absence of anything resembling a social democratic party. Mary Lou McDonald, should she succeed him, will have the opportunity to redeem the past by giving nationalism a more human face, making it relevant to the realities of today’s Ireland.
Our people are crying out for a life that befits them as humans. This will not be achieved without a radical confrontation of the shameful levels of poverty and sense of hopelessness that permeates our life and not by the forlorn hope of a politically united Ireland. Far too many continue to experience the raw challenge of getting enough food on the table.
Padraig Pearse’s oration at the grave of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa might now be recast, suggesting that Ireland ‘unfree from poverty shall never be at peace’.
Philip O’Neill