Gary Kavanagh of this publication recently wrote: “The republican movement was brought into the peace process on the basis that if it engaged in peaceful negotiation, it would be welcomed into the democratic system”. Accordingly, says Kavanagh, other political parties should now be willing to consider Sinn Féin as an acceptable potential partner in any future government. I don’t accept Gary Kavanagh’s argument. Here’s why.
When you’re a pub musician, as I was for many years, it’s good to get people up to sing. Too many pub musicians, in my experience, carry on in an aloof manner, ignoring the pub patrons who they are supposed to be entertaining. So it was in about 1990 that I was playing my guitar and singing one busy Friday evening in a County Dublin pub. I was playing a selection of U2 songs when a middle-aged man, a regular there, said to me it was time that we heard an Irish song. There was a young man with us this evening, he told me, released from Portlaoise Prison earlier in the week, who would like to sing a song. This young man joined us and gestured that he wanted to play my guitar.
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