Tricolours and funerals: bringing shame on the national flag

Ten days ago, republicans buried garda killer and ex-wife stabber Pearse McAuley in a flag-cloaked coffin, flanked by a male colour party clumping along the concrete in their boots. On Wednesday, Michelle O’Neill was asked about this funeral.

“Sinn Féin had no part in that and don’t believe that a Tricolour should have been placed on his coffin.”

Prior to her statement, Pearse Doherty, Eoin Ó Broin and David Cullinane had all said something similar. If nothing else, Sinn Féin knows how to keep them all on-message.

Had Sinn Féin not wanted a Tricolour on McAuley’s coffin, all it had to do was talk to the Strabane Cairde Republican Ex-prisoners Group, whose logo adorned the jackets of the funeral colour party.

It isn’t as if they don’t know who they are. This is, after all, the same group who campaigned in 2003 for the release of those who killed Detective Garda Jerry McCabe and advertised this in An Phoblacht — the Sinn Féin-linked newspaper.

The condemnation of the act of domestic violence — McAuley stabbed his estranged wife in front of their children on Christmas Eve 2014 — while simultaneously adopting a party position that there was no alternative to so-called political violence is something which should be called out by everyone with a brain and backbone. The self-proclaimed “First Minister for all” has yet to be asked.

Last Sunday, Simon Harris brought Fine Gael to its feet with a roaring: “Let’s take our flag back.” Separately, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said it was “outrageous” McAuley’s coffin had a flag. Most agreed.

Sinn Féin-linked republicans are no stranger to controversy in this arena. In the 1980s, Bishop Edward Daly of Derry banned tricolour-swathed coffins from churches. The republican movement bent the rules by marching colour parties to the church doors, where they removed it with pomp.

The church completely missed the irony of blessing killers’ bodies with oil and incense, flag or no flag. Fathers, no amount of holy water was going to turn an unrepentant killer, even in their graves. We all went through the charade, regardless.

In 1990, Armagh IRA man and SAS victim Dessie Grew’s funeral took place with the flag. At the graveyard, Gerry Adams spoke of republicans carrying on Grew’s “unfinished business”, referring to him as a “freedom fighter” and “a decent upstanding Irish citizen”. Just one year before, German police had issued an arrest warrant for Grew — who was suspected of involvement in the death of six-month-old Nivruti Islania, shot in the head in a hail of bullets, along with her father.

In 1993, Adams carried the coffin of Shankill bomber Thomas Begley, complete with flag, beret, and gloves, causing further hurt to the families of Begley’s victims — which included 13-year-old Leanne Murray, who had gone excitedly into her local fishmongers to buy whelks.

In 2003, west Belfast came to a standstill as the tricolour-adorned coffin of Gerry Adams’ father, also called Gerry, snaked through Andersonstown to Milltown Cemetery.

In an RTÉ interview given in 2009, the former Sinn Féin president said he felt his father had “besmirched” the flag. Why? Because at the time, Adams knew his father had been accused of child abuse.

For decades, Shinner-supporting republicans have not only besmirched the flag, but provided a cover for numerous brutes. They would shoulder the ritual but none of the responsibility for the carnage caused by the celebrated dead.

In Ireland, the Tricolour became a symbol of patriotic pride. In Northern Ireland, it was a symbol of defiance.

I shouldered my share of tricolouradorned coffins, sat in houses hosting IRA guards of honour around dead bodies, and stood weeping in silence as my grandparents and other relatives had flags unfolded at triangular points and pinned in place by people playing soldiers. And so, I mean it when I say that republicans should ban the ridiculous spectacle of using the departed in circus-like ceremonies and consign it to the past.

John Hume once famously said: “You can’t eat a flag.” Those who are dead don’t know whether they are lying under one either. We do.

In November 2014, both Gerry Adams and Mary Lou McDonald said that republicans who volunteered for the IRA were “decent”. That blanket statement was both strategically inept and abhorrent, giving political cover to those who went through the IRA ranks. It has never been qualified or retracted. Just one month later, Pearse McAuley stabbed his ex-wife Pauline Tully in front of their children, making a mockery of Sinn Féin’s line that the IRA were “decent people”.

Traditionally, Easter Sunday is a time to remember the dead. As Shinners flock to their fallen in cemeteries around the country this afternoon, Sinn Féin should use their Easter message to announce that the party under McDonald’s leadership will no longer commemorate or celebrate anyone who has been involved in any act of violence which injured or killed someone, due to the hurt heaped on victims, domestic or otherwise.

It should be relatively simple. Experience tells us it won’t happen.

McDonald aside, the republican movement can hardly do a Pontius Pilate and wash its hands of McAuley and his ilk, just because it is politically inconvenient, or because they didn’t support his recent domestic barbarity but lionised his prior inflictions.

The republican movement birthed violence, attracted some with a penchant for it to its ranks, desensitised them to death, primed them to pulp people with bombs and guns, and buried them with full honours in death. He’s theirs.

As the song goes, by shrouding such people in the national flag, those self-proclaimed republicans have brought on it nothing but shame.