Ask Sinn Féin about the conduct of the IRA during the long conflict in Northern Ireland, and you will be told that it is unhelpful to keep talking about the past, and that voters have moved on from it.
Ask them, by contrast, about the conduct of the British state, or loyalist terrorists, during that conflict, and you will get the opposite answer. When it comes to the brutal murder of Pat Finucane, or the horrific killings on bloody Sunday, Sinn Féin are eager to keep the wounds open, and fresh, and in the public mind. They are within their rights to do so – those were horrific actions, and those who were victims of them deserve justice, no matter how long it takes.
But when it comes to the Enniskillen bombing, or the murder of children in Warrington, Sinn Féin wants us to regard it as ancient history. Whether a horrific crime is relevant today, or just a form of outrage archaeology is, in Sinn Fein’s telling, a simple matter of first asking which side carried it out.
It is increasingly accepted by political commentators that this strategy is working. “The young people do not care about what happened thirty years ago, they care instead about housing and health and opportunities today”. That, or some formulation close to it, is one of the most often cited pieces of contemporary Irish pundit wisdom. There is truth to it. But it is not the full truth, nor is it, even, necessarily relevant.
The fact is that for all that there are many in the population who do not care about the IRA’s actions now, there remain a great many people – probably a majority – for whom all of this is very hard to stomach.
After all, when the violence was happening, there was little doubt how the public felt. In the 1992 General Election, in Cavan Monaghan, Caoimhghín O’Caolain received 4,000 votes, or 7%, for Sinn Fein, in the midst of the IRA’s campaign, and did not come close to a seat, even in a part of the country that was prime ground for IRA recruiters. Five years later, directly after the second, and final, IRA ceasefire, the same candidate won 11,000 votes, or 20%, and topped the poll. Even those who have been voting Sinn Fein for 20 years, in the main, only started doing so after the murders stopped. In pretty much every regularly scheduled election in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein had their backsides beaten by the SDLP, while the violence was ongoing.
This matters, because there is an ongoing effort to pretend that the IRA did what it did with widespread popular support, and that the public were behind them, as they were behind Michael Collins and Eamon DeValera a century earlier. This is simply not true. And it is, and was, not true for good reason.
Over the 25 years of its military campaign in Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA murdered 1,700 people. That is not a small number. It inflicted grievous injuries on many more, including many nationalists, catholics, or people otherwise believed to be on it’s “side” of the conflict. Many of these murders – and attempted murders – were little short of cowardly. This week, for example, we were treated to the spectacle of Sinn Fein TDs openly honouring “volunteer” Joseph McManus, killed in action in February 1992. It is not my usual practice to speak ill of the dead, so here, we’ll just stick to the bare facts: Joseph McManus died in action during an operation in which he had kidnapped and held hostage a farmer in county Fermanagh. The plan was that the farmer would be forced to call for the assistance of the local dog warden, who was also a part-time member of the UDR. The objective of the operation was to shoot the dog warden in cold blood, for the crime of his UDR membership. Unfortunately for McManus, the dog warden shot back, and survived. McManus did not.
There is, of course, room for us all to agree that such horrific events are ancient history and should be forgotten. But that is not Sinn Féin’s present position. Their position is that those events are both ancient history, and heroic. A reasonable person might accept that bad things happened in the troubles, and we should draw a line under them, and move on. But with Sinn Féin, we are being asked to accept that those who tried to murder a dog warden in cold blood, and kidnapped a family to do it, are Irish heroes. They are not. They never were. Nobody thought they were at the time. Those who do so today are inventing a mythology, not celebrating anything with a basis in fact.
This is all relevant because there is an increasing resignation amongst some people that this strategy of Sinn Féin’s is working, and that people should simply stop talking about it. That, of course, is exactly what the party wants. We can stop talking about it, but, let us be clear: They never will. When everybody else goes quiet in resignation, then the Sinn Féin project to turn Joseph McManus, and many like him, into national heroes, will begin in earnest. One day we will wake up to find that the children in our schools are learning that McManus did what he did for them and died a hero. When you let the losers write the history, that is what happens.
Because here is what is not said often enough: The IRA, and Sinn Féin, fought a long war, and lost it. The British Government did what it has done to dissident movements the world over, and co-opted them. Gerry Adams, amongst his many honours, is a former Crown Steward of the United Kingdom. Many Sinn Féin members have served as Crown Ministers. Northern Ireland remains as British today, legally and culturally, as it was when the first ‘ra man lifted a gun in anger. All that killing, and all that destruction, led to nothing except the top provos becoming members in good standing of the British establishment, as content to work constitutionally as Nicola Sturgeon is in Scotland. In the end, both Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, and Margaret Thatcher, outlived the IRA, by well over a decade each.
Sinn Fein, today, are a party that want us all to dip our hands in the blood which they shed, and supported shedding. A vote for them remains – despite what anybody else claims – a vote to accept the legitimacy of their “war”.