In 2020, one of the unpredicted but apparently significant factors that led to Sinn Féin winning the largest number of votes in the February general election was of all things an historical faux pas by then Minister for Justice, Charlie Flanagan of Fine Gael.
Flanagan, as part of the official commemoration programme of events during the revolutionary period after 1916, stood firmly over his decision to honour the men of the Royal Irish Constabulary who had died during the War of Independence, otherwise popularly known as the ‘Tan War’ after its most infamous participants the Black and Tans who were members of the RIC.
That tone-deaf decision presented what in Belfast is colloquially known as a ‘penalty kick’ to the Shinners who saw their vote increase by around ten points over the course of the campaign. Given their recent travails they will be desperately hoping for something similar this time as they languish at around ten points lower than the heights they were hitting for most of the four years since the 2020 hustings.
One may yet happen along, but for the moment they appear to have created their very own ‘Tangate’ by Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill’s decision to attend the official Belfast City Council’s Remembrance Sunday event associated with the ending of World War I on November 11, 1918.
Poppy Day as it is popularly known not only commemorates those who fell in that conflict – itself a controversial and divisive issue still within Irish public discourse – but all who have died wearing the uniform of the British state, which includes those killed by the IRA.
Sinn Féin’s own Antonio Gramsci, the great theoretician and strategist Declan Kearney, who has been on point for several of the “dialectical” somersaults performed by the party as it has negotiated its path into partitionist social democratic respectability, was not shirking this bald fact when he referred in the press statement issued on Saturday to “the dead from all traditions” including in “more recent times” than 1918.
Fair Dinkum some might say and acknowledge it as another sign of maturity and the wish to set aside past differences and so on. That is not how it is being regarded in some of the republican heartlands. however.
People generally have no problem with anyone who wishes to commemorate the British war dead but O’Neill’s gesture is regarded by some as another symbol of Sinn Féin’s acceptance that they are part of the administration of a state which in effect defeated the republican movement politically, if not militarily.
In attending the commemoration, critics claim that Sinn Féin is recognising that the state which the IRA sought to overthrow is still there and that its forces are the only ones worthy of official recognition – something which a letter published in The Irish News on Friday points out has also been tacitly accepted by O’Neill’s decision to not attend republican commemorations in Tyrone.
The letter, which was signed by more than one hundred republicans – most of them from O’Neill’s own county of Tyrone and including relatives of IRA Volunteers, Sinn Féin members and Catholic civilians killed by British forces and loyalists (a category not always distinct) – condemned her decision to attend.
They described the decision to “attend events with British and unionist politicians and their military leader” where “she will also lay a wreath honouring British soldiers and RUC members killed during the conflict” as “shameful”, saying these were “the same forces that murdered men, women, children, and priests with impunity.”
“For many families throughout our county, and beyond, this will be devastating,” they continued. “It is heartbreaking when we consider that Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald determined several years ago that rather than offend the sensitivities of their unionist and British colleagues, and media, they would not attend key republican commemorations.”
In fairness to Sinn Fein, many of the appended names are of people who have long since severed their ties so it is not exactly earth shattering. The party has successfully staved off any serious political challenge from republicans of the more traditional or leftist variety, in Tyrone as much as in any other of the heartlands.
That aside, O’Neill’s attendance has struck a raw nerve more widely. Sinn Féin in the north is not facing any imminent electoral contests, however, and has only been marginally impacted by its past dalliance with the Royals and what not. As one wry old timer said to me after one such occasion, “If they can explain away running the place for the Brits, they are hardly going to collapse over getting stuck into the quiche and port at Charlie’s coronation.”
This comes at the start of a crucial election in the Republic, but the raw nerves grated on the Mexican side of the border are mostly those of people who have likewise long parted ways with the party. At this stage anyone who still thinks that an “undefeated army” won the struggle to establish cross border agencies by the firing of mythical “SAM missiles in the sky” is hardly going to be torn from their allegiance to whoever they continue to stuff letter boxes for.
In any event, ‘Poppyism’ is no longer much of an issue in the 26 counties. There was a time when the symbol was quite often seen worn around parts of Dublin and not rarely by well known figures whose decision to wear it was as much to do with their opposition to Irish nationalism and to the Provos in particular as it had to do with any sincere desire to remember the lads who fell in muddy fields in Flanders.
Otherwise, you would still see as many of them wearing a poppy and you do not. Not least perhaps because those adjacent to the political sphere have copped on that the more the establishment identifies with all of that retro Empire stuff, the easier it is for the Shinners to portray themselves as having the copyright on a militant nationalism which it has itself in effect also abandoned.
The poppy has perhaps been replaced as a trigger by the rather surreal air wars that regularly erupt over all sorts of people from women soccer players to wedding guests chanting ‘Ooh ah, up the ‘Ra’ either spontaneously or as part of the rendering of the truly cringeworthy Wolfe Tones’ “symphony” to a Glasgow association football team.
Smarter people than I have attempted to persuade me that this is evidence of the subterranean survival of an instinctive visceral nationalism that has survived all of the relentless assaults upon it. I remain to be persuaded and the only emotion it evokes in me is a mixture of embarrassment and sadness.
Just as does seeing a Sinn Féin minister of the part of Ireland ruled by Britain effectively acknowledging that the Tans and Auxies, and Paras and Blackwatch, and the lads in mufti who directed the death squads in the killing fields of Tyrone, were the right side when all is said and done.