No one should be afraid to let democracy decide fate of SF
My mother was bombed by loyalists, but unlike the Sinn Fein leader, I never felt ‘justified’ to take up a gun, writes
ACCORDING to a chronology of the Troubles compiled by local historians in Belfast, it happened on Friday, November 9, 1973. “Motherof-six Theresa O’Hanlon was hit by flying glass when a 4oz pipe bomb was thrown through the ground floor window of her home at Rosemount Gardens. She was in the living room when the small bomb exploded, smashing windows in the house and in other houses nearby. A sister of Joe Cahill, Mrs O’Hanlon’s condition was described as fair.”
That was my mother. That was our house. I don’t remember much about it, except for being brought downstairs afterwards and seeing two policemen standing in the living room, before being taken to the home of a family friend to sleep. I also don’t think it was a Friday, because next day was a school day and we got that off. I do know, though, what happened in the years after loyalists threw that “small bomb” through our window, and my mother was hurled across the front room, and the history books only tell a part of the tale.
My mother’s condition may have been “described as fair” at the time, but these things are relative. In fact, she suffered extensive injuries to her leg, and, in the months that followed, lost her hair and teeth and dropped to five stones in weight. She lived with severe pain and impaired mobility for the rest of her life. The people who planned and threw the bomb probably never knew that. In all likelihood, they wouldn’t have cared anyway. At one point, the agony was so bad that she begged doctors to cut her leg off.
So I suppose the only question I’d have for Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald following on from her interview in these pages last week is this: would joining the IRA have been a reasonable or proportionate response to that situation? In future years, still outraged by that memory, would I have been, in her words, “justified” to take up a gun?
Or would it, as I believe, have made Northern Ireland a worse place than it was already, adding to the misery of others without lessening those of my own community?
We’d only moved to Rosemount Gardens a few years earlier after being put out of our previous home by loyalist paramilitaries. These experiences were not unusual. Like many families at the time, heavy-handed British Army personnel would raid the house now and again. Once my four foot, 11 and a half inch mother was arrested for assault on a six foot-something soldier. The police doctor who examined her bruises afterwards was pretty sure which of the two had really been assaulted. These were alarming things to witness for any child.
I know people who were killed or who were the targets of attempted murder during the Troubles. On another occasion, a car slowed down as my mother walked down the road and a gun was pulled on her, but it jammed. Nothing was normal about the political situation. Even in the context of the early 1970s, the bomb attack on our house barely made a ripple on the surface of what was happening. In 1973, 253 people died, half of them civilians. In the whole course of the Troubles, more than 50,000 people were injured, some less and many more severely than her.
Imagine if the growth in terrorist violence, like viruses, had been exponential; if every one of those 50,000 people who were injured had gone on to inflict violence on others, and those victims in turn had done the same. The resulting rate of revenge would have burned Northern Ireland to cinders.
But people didn’t do that. The atmosphere for decades was hateful, traumatic, but none of the people with whom I went to school and with whom I was friends ever joined the IRA. They were not well off or privileged. One of the least privileged of them was most passionately anti-republican. They, too, lived with what apologists for violence like to call “the reality of the situation” every day. But they didn’t throw pipe bombs.
Of course, plenty of people in the Catholic nationalist community did have sympathy with the Provos, but only a minority got “involved”, as the euphemism has it. Increasingly, though, it’s that minority who get to tell their side of the story, and the other quiet story that ran alongside it goes untold.
And what’s even stranger about it is that, when those of us who did live through those evil times try to explain what we thought about it, our own backgrounds and experiences are often used as weapons against us, as if to invalidate what we say. My uncle was Chief of Staff of the IRA for a long time. My late sister was in the IRA, and later worked as an aide for Gerry Adams. These little factlets are frequently thrown at me on social media — not by unionists or loyalists, but by republicans who seem to think that they somehow prove me wrong.
Presumably, the assumption is that I can’t possibly mean what I say because nobody from my background could be opposed to the IRA, when the truth is that most of the people from my background were opposed to what the IRA did. There was always a choice. There were always other options.
When Mary Lou McDonald suggests that there is “every chance, every possibility” that her choice would have been to join the IRA, she is probably speaking as a woman who’s sat in too many rooms in West Belfast and South Armagh being told cosy folk tales by former hard men of how they “took the fight to the British state”, as she euphemistically put it.
She’s entitled to her view. She may well have joined her local active service unit too, if she’d been born in the North.
But it’s quite a jaw-dropping statement to make, and the Sinn Fein leader can’t expect it to go unchallenged. Part of being a normal party is about being held to the same moral standards as other parties. Sinn Fein needs to find a way to answer these questions without providing perpetual reminders of the ways in which they remain abnormal.
At the same time, their opponents and critics need to ask themselves some serious questions as well. People know that Sinn Fein continues to justify a campaign which involved indiscriminate and sectarian slaughter, and, angry at glaring economic inequality, they still voted for the party in huge numbers in February. Had it not been for a tactical error in not running enough candidates, Mary Lou would undoubtedly have been sitting on the most seats in the Dail. Pointing out SF’s moral shortcomings hasn’t halted the party’s rise in the polls.
Young people don’t seem to care about the Troubles. I wish they did. They should. Just because something hasn’t affected you directly doesn’t mean it can be callously set aside as unimportant. But by and large, it passes below their radar. Even older voters are less bothered by Sinn Fein’s violent past than they used to be, as the election results showed.
Ironically, that’s partly because Sinn Fein’s critics were hugely successful at keeping Gerry Adams’s past in the spotlight and making it so that the party couldn’t move on. Sinn Fein was urged repeatedly to move on from the old “Northern command”, and they did. That sent a message to voters. Now critics rail that the same tactic isn’t working against Mary Lou McDonald.
She might fantasise about what she’d have done if she’d faced those dastardly Brits, but the reality is that she wasn’t in the IRA, she wasn’t even in Northern Ireland, so that can’t be held against her. Her answers to questions about the IRA throw up a huge question mark around her judgment, but it’s not itself a big enough reason for many to not vote for Sinn Fein. I know plenty of those who do, and they’re not doing it from badness.
Indeed, Sinn Fein being in government in the North has removed many of the objections against them being in government in Dublin. Their enemies say the Republic is different, and it is; but it does involve some mental gymnastics to say that having them run departments on one side of the Border is a sign of progress, and barring the doors against them on the other side of the Border is the only way to stop Ireland falling into the hands of the Provos. To most people, that looks contradictory and hypocritical. They’re not wholly wrong.
Those who wish to keep Sinn Fein out of government, regardless of how many votes they get, are like those in the US and UK who manned the resistance against President Trump and Brexit. Sinn Fein hates to see itself in that light, but they pose the same populist challenge that has faced other countries, and we should learn from how those other surges have been mishandled. Democrats cannot pick and choose which democratic results to accept.
In Britain right now, there’s a growing mood among his opponents that Boris Johnson is “unfit to be prime minister”. Many sincerely believe that Mary Lou’s comments last weekend make her unfit to be Taoiseach or Tanaiste as well. I know exactly how they feel. But in a democracy, these matters are not decided by who is “fit” to lead, but by who actually wins. If Peter Casey had won the last Presidential election, he would now be in the Aras. If Mary Lou McDonald had won the most seats, she’d have had a strong claim to be Taoiseach, with all the usual provisos about being able to put together a working coalition. The greatest threat to stability is not populism, but trying to stop populism by changing the rules of the game.
As it happens, Sinn Fein is open to the accusation that it made no serious efforts to form a government after the election, and can hardly complain if others went ahead and did so without them. It should still leave a sour taste in the mouth of anyone who believes in democracy, in all its messy glory, when it’s implied that the country should be run by those who know what’s good for the people better than they know themselves.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fail
have been able to find a way to bypass Sinn Fein this time, but it may well be their last hurrah. The experience in other countries suggests that trying to deal with populism by stamping on the shoots as they come up only makes them grow back stronger. It doesn’t matter what I, or anyone else, thinks about that. I’m never going to vote for SF, but there are no risk-free options in a democracy.
If I had to predict, I’d say the main effect of bringing SF into government would actually be crashing disappointment. Indeed, one unfortunate side-effect of concentrating too much on SF’s dirty little passion for the IRA is that it dilutes proper scrutiny of SF’s other policies, including their poor record in government in Northern Ireland. It’s a constant amazement how they’re able to promise the sun, moon and stars in Irish elections, despite barely being able to deliver on a single promise in the North. Government might be the one place where their claim to be some radical alternative can be finally exposed.
It’s been more than 20 years since the Belfast Agreement. That Sinn Fein is still wallowing in dewy-eyed nostalgia for the most brutal terrorist campaign in modern European history is disgusting; but being terrified of them getting into government hands republicans more power than they’ve ever been able to grasp by their own efforts. I’ve never been afraid of Sinn Fein, and I’m not starting now.
Irish democracy always has been, and always will be, stronger than they are.