Eoghan Harris

Wake-up call for wokes soft on Sinn Fein

LAST Friday, Stephen Collins knocked on the gate of a morally confused media in an Irish Times op-ed piece headed: “Storey funeral a reminder that IRA army council runs Sinn Fein.”

The knock on the gate refers to a famous essay by Thomas de Quincey on what happens in Macbeth at the end of act two, scene two.

Macbeth and his wife have just murdered Duncan. But we, the audience, locked in with the Macbeths on a dark stage, don’t yet feel the full horror of the foul deed.

A sudden, loud knock on the gate startles the Macbeths — but also shocks the audience out of its compliant empathy.

That loud knock reminds us of the world outside and returns us to the morality learned from our mothers and fathers.

Stephen Collins’s powerful indictment of media compliance with Sinn Fein apologists for the IRA atrocities carried the same kind of moral shock.

Whether it will wake a woke generation is moot. That is why many of my older readers write to say they feel they are living in a media madhouse since the general election.

That is because so many younger journalists seem to see nothing wrong with voting for a fascist party and deny it is such.

But Sinn Fein has the main marks of a fascist party: it condones political murder, is controlled by a small group of fanatics, and respects them more than Irish democracy.

But what it shares most with German fascism is its shameless contempt for democracy.

Mary Lou McDonald coolly told us that if she were Taoiseach she would have still turned up at the funeral of a violent thug who was deeply involved in the death of Jean McConville.

Many of our younger journalists don’t seem to see that as a deadly political and moral problem.

Significantly, like Sinn Fein, they get especially angry with anyone who points it out as a moral problem — because they suspect many people privately feel the same.

Collins particularly noted that Micheal Martin had been targeted for expressing moral revulsion. “He has been accused of being obsessed by the past and being out of touch with public opinion in the Republic but the Storey funeral provided ample justification for his position.”

Collins himself is almost alone in the Irish media in carrying out one of the primary tasks of a journalist — to warn against the dangers posed by a fascist party.

But the Bobby Storey funeral showed that many in our media were hypnotised by two factors — what Susan Sontag called “fascinating fascism” and by a perverse view of the peace process.

In relation to fascinating fascism, some reporters seemed enthralled by the cheap theatricals of the Storey funeral.

Journalists who affect hardbitten cynicism about Micheal Martin’s moral revulsion seemed reverently in awe of the mafia-style trappings.

But it just reminded this hardbitten reporter of Hitler’s sacralisation of the funeral of the Nazi thug Horst Wessel.

Turning to the peace process, let me remind our media muppets we owe nothing to Sinn Fein for stopping its campaign of murder when it became riddled with informers.

If someone is beating his wife you don’t praise them for stopping.

But anyone who calls out Sinn Fein on its fascism is faced with a hostile media that seems happy to go along with Sinn Fein’s two main media ploys: the taboo and the distractor.

The Sinn Fein-inspired media taboo against raising Sinn Fein’s link with murder and terror has been 30 years in the making.

It began in RTE with a campaign against Section 31 which rightly kept Sinn Fein off the airwaves. That campaign radicalised a generation of journalists who found themselves on the same side as Sinn Fein and failed to keep boundaries.

From the Good Friday Agreement onwards,

Sinn Fein made sure this compliance morphed into the belief that the peace process meant it was taboo to raise Sinn Fein’s past.

Raising Sinn Fein’s past is now treated as a media social faux pas and those who dare to do so are shushed or shunned.

Stephen Collins also drew attention to the second Sinn Fein media device, which is to deploy a distractor like social distancing to divert attention from murder.

“The manner in which Sinn Fein leaders flouted social distancing during the funeral of IRA leader Bobby Storey has attracted widespread criticism, but the more sinister feature of the event was the paramilitary trappings that put the true nature of the republican movement on open display.”

Here Collins is flushing out how a compliant media focused on social distancing which only served to distract from more serious issues.

Significantly, Sinn Fein spokespersons had no problem fielding these questions — and never got as angry as they would have done if asked about Storey’s role in the murder of Jean McConville.

Last week, even the toughest of presenters seemed to be struggling with the culture of compliance that constricts coverage of Sinn Fein’s past.

Last Tuesday on The Tonight Show, Ivan Yates, in speaking to Labour’s Aodhan O Riordain, raised the Storey funeral — but it was not followed through.

Now I’ve been around television long enough to know when someone in the production box — and they have the last word — is speaking to the presenter’s earpiece.

Why on earth would anyone not have Yates pursue what was a red-hot subject? Cui bono? Who benefits? Certainly not Tonight. Only Sinn Fein.

On Friday on RTE’s Today, we had further examples of taboos and distractors. Sarah McInerney was seeming to convince FG TD Jennifer Carroll MacNeill that SF TD Martin Kenny had a case in saying all parties were guilty of social-distancing failures.

“But as Martin said, we have seen similar large funerals like that in the

State in recent weeks ... Why can’t they be compared?”

MacNeill: “Well what are you comparing, Sarah?”

McInerney: “Well, as Martin said, there have been large funerals. I saw Matt Carthy on The Tonight Show talking about Garda Horkan’s funeral.”

MacNeill (in disbelief ): “The funeral of a serving guard killed in the line of duty?”

McInerney (a little sheepishly): “Well, yes, he was raising that as an issue, as a comparison, yes.”

Emboldened by this, Martin Kenny called MacNeill a “Dublin unionist”.

MacNeill came back bravely and began to go into Bobby Storey’s bloody past “as someone involved in murders across this island”.

But McInerney piously cut in: “This is also somebody who’s passed away recently, Jennifer. So I don’t really want to get into that.”

Even more emboldened, Martin Kenny censoriously tut-tutted: “It’s not appropriate to talk like that about the dead.”

But apart from Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, most FG TDs dodged dealing with Storey’s past.

And, of course, some FF TDs were far too busy whining about promotions to take on the Provos.

‘Raising Sinn Fein’s past is now treated as a media social faux pas’