There are more bodies ready to rise from Sinn Fein’s past

ONE of the most indelible images of the Holocaust shows American GIs escorting shocked and sobbing German civilians past piled skeletal bodies in a concentration camp.

March them past the bodies. The General Election proved this is the best way to protect this gullible generation from the poison of Sinn Fein, the puppet party of the Provisional army council.

Sinn Fein hates habeas corpus. It hates being asked about specific bodies.

Stalin, too, feared that specific body, saying “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.

Luckily for Sinn Fein, our Pollyanna media is happy to talk to Sinn Fein about statistics, but reluctant to march the public past the bodies of IRA victims.

During the 2011 presidential election, I criticised Sean O’Rourke’s show for not confronting Martin McGuinness with IRA victims like Frank Hegarty and Patsy Gillespie.

But when Miriam O’Callaghan, showing great courage did so, McGuinness dropped his mask and we saw his real face. Not a pretty sight.

The pattern was repeated in this election. Sean O’Rourke’s show was slow to catch up with the Breege Quinn story, while Bryan Dobson and Miriam O’Callaghan (again) put

Sinn Fein on the spot.

O’Rourke’s panels reflected the flawed media consensus during the first fortnight of the campaign — that Sinn Fein can be treated like a normal party.

For two weeks the talk panels were all smiles to Eoin O Broin and his statistics and sour to

Micheal Martin for believing that excluding Sinn Fein was a moral issue.

Last Monday night’s Irish Times poll showing Sinn Fein ahead of Fianna Fail caused them to explode with premature ejaculations that FF and FG were toast.

Chief among them was Fintan O’Toole who told us Sinn Fein could no longer be excluded from government.

But earlier that evening Breege Quinn came before the Irish people, like Mary in Michelangelo’s Pieta, metaphorically bearing the broken body of her son Paul, to share her story with Mary Wilson on Drivetime.

Listening, you could almost feel the blows that smashed her beloved son’s body. If it were a film, you’d turn your head away.

Unlike many in the media, SF knew it was in bad trouble and activated two standard strategies for re-burying bodies.

First, they hypocritically claimed the grim images evoked were hurting the families of the victims — when of course they were only hurting Sinn Fein.

Second, SF got some media saps to swallow the whine that the sadistic murder was being used politically against SF.

Which, of course, was precisely what Breege Quinn wanted politicians to do.

Breege Quinn’s heart is broken but she still forces her son’s killers to look away.

She forced many in the shamed media to look away, too. Like Fintan O’Toole they were caught by evolving events.

Fintan O’Toole is one of the finest critics of this generation, but he is attracted by popular bandwagons — like beating up on the Brits about Brexit.

Although a winner of the Orwell Prize, he seems blind to the fact that Orwell never once climbed on a consensus bandwagon but tried to block them.

Last Monday night, presumably after he had seen the IT poll with the

Sinn Fein surge, he wrote: “There can be no progressive government in Ireland without Sinn Fein.”

Progressive? Sinn Fein? Why would our leading public intellectual write these contradictory words?

Probably because like most Irish liberal left intellectuals, O’Toole reserves “progressive” for trending issues rather than timeless issues.

Like them, he is so busy calling out alleged Trump fascism abroad that he cannot seem to see proven Sinn Fein fascism at home.

In my view, Sinn Fein, for all its socialist rhetoric, is really a right-wing nationalist party, with a proto-fascist future agenda.

History does not repeat itself, but Sinn Fein shows striking similarities with some fascist parties of the 1930s. Let me list them.

Sinn Fein is the only European party with an armed wing — marking us out as a rogue democracy.

Sinn Fein persistently demonises a minority ethnic group — Northern Protestants.

Sinn Fein agitates about “its” ethnic group in an adjoining region to stir up trouble in its own version of the Sudetenland.

Sinn Fein promotes a martyrology around sectarian IRA killers akin to that around the Nazi thug, Horst Wessel.

Sinn Fein peddles a heroic false narrative about its squalid terrorist past to seduce a younger generation.

Fintan O’Toole is one of the few columnists who gives “permission” to lesser polemicists to throw shapes.

Last Tuesday, the Sean O’Rourke panel, high on the nod from O’Toole, happily unaware of Bryan Dobson’s impending interview with Mary Lou McDonald, never mentioned Breege Quinn. Instead they recited the evidence-free media mantra that excluding Sinn Fein from government had “backfired”.

Sean O’Rourke failed to ask these prattlers the logical question: “So why is Sinn Fein screaming in pain?”

The panel’s myopia was echoed as late as last Wednesday, in David DavinPower’s piece in the Irish Examiner arguing the case for SF inclusion:

“Sinn Fein, it is true, is linked to those who have blood on their hands, and played a shameful role in prolonging a squalid conflict that blackened the name of this country for a generation. But that ended when Leo Varadkar was 15, and has little relevance for many of his generation.”

Really? Leo Varadkar was elected to the Dail in 2007, the year of the Paul Quinn murder. If he did not notice, Micheal Martin did.

Davin-Power went on to take out some insurance, but not enough in my view.

“That’s not to say the party should not be held to account for those years, but those claiming that they make Sinn Fein unfit for office shouldn’t expect to profit at the ballot box.”

Why should politicians not expect to profit from calling out murder? Because if they don’t profit it means we have a morally dead electorate.

Our citizens get small help from RTE. Despite Dobson and O’Callaghan’s efforts, RTE’s default reflex is to be soft on SF.

Let’s hope that Breege Quinn’s story will prompt RTE to transmit BBC Spotlight’s brilliant and balanced series on the Northern conflict.

But Breege Quinn’s story is a warning to RTE: there are more bodies ready to rise from the past — even if RTE don’t allow me on air to point them out.

Among them is Joseph Rafferty, murdered by the IRA in Dublin in 2005, when Mary Lou McDonald was already a seasoned Sinn Fein politician.

Councillor Daithi Doolan of Sinn Fein promised the Rafferty family that Sinn Fein would follow up on the IRA suspect. So far they have heard nothing.

Last Tuesday, Doolan tweeted a photo of Fintan O’Toole’s “inclusion” article.

He approvingly quoted O’Toole “there can be no progressive government in Ireland without Sinn Fein”.

Doolan added: “I’ll just let that one hang there.”

It certainly left Fintan O’Toole hanging there.

Time to give back the Orwell Prize?

‘SF hates habeas corpus, hates bringing up the bodies. Our craven media don’t like it either’