If you have ever listened to Sinn Fein for more than five minutes, you should really be able to recite some of that party’s case for Irish unity off the top of your head.
Northern Ireland is an artificial statelet which has been economically impaired by partition and British neglect. It is disproportionately deprived and needs investment. The border is a barrier to efficiency and the Irish sea is a barrier to empathy, meaning that Northern Ireland is left in a shadow state where Irish people are unable to fully aid it, and British people have no interest in aiding it. Unity would unleash its potential.
The economic element is not central to the case for Irish Unity for republicans (who would in fairness still desire Unity even if it were proven beyond any doubt that it would cost money) but it is certainly central to the case Sinn Fein makes to the rest of the world for Irish unity. Northern Ireland has been neglected by the British, and needs aid and support from the rest of the world.
This year, Northern Ireland’s First Minister has decided that she will not attend the White House on Saint Patrick’s Day – should she be invited, which remains an open question – because she wishes to protest the US President’s position on Gaza. In this decision she is echoed and supported by her party President, who is also in theory the leader of the official opposition south of the border.
Thus, the cause of Irish nationalism, and Northern Irish nationalists, will not get a hearing in the White House this year. The case for Northern Ireland will be made by Emma Little-Pengelly, the Deputy First Minister, and the leader of Northern Unionism. That is the perspective on Northern Irish politics that will be presented to a US President who is, it is fair to say, not well known for taking snubs with grace and good humour.
This is all being done in the name of the Gaza strip and Palestinians.
I am not here – at least not in this article – to tell anybody that they have no just reason to care about the fate of the Gaza strip or its inhabitants. What I will say is that the Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza strip have their own elected (Hamas) and unelected (Palestinian Authority) representatives to make their case for them. Their best efforts at making that case yesterday involved parading the dead bodies of Israeli children in front of cheering crowds of civilians.
In that sense, the timing of this morning’s Sinn Fein strop says much about that party’s increasing Gaza insanity: It is now overtly putting the interests of Palestinians in Gaza ahead of the interests of the nationalist people in Northern Ireland that it claims to represent. And it is doing so at a time when most civilised people in most civilised parts of the western world feel nothing but abhorrence for the actions of the people actually elected by the Palestinians of Gaza to represent them.
It is telling, I think, that Sinn Fein has been at its most effective as an opposition party in shaping Irish Government policy over Gaza. On that topic, the Government has moved in Sinn Fein’s direction more than just about any other, and that is not a coincidence. Had Sinn Fein expended the same level of energy opposing the Irish Government over the cost of the Children’s Hospital, or on the appropriateness of 60kph speed limits, for example, who knows what it might have been achieved.
But the now undeniable fact is that Sinn Fein sees domestic issues and the job of representing Irish voters as trifling compared to the great cause of Palestinian revolution. This is, I think, inherently psychological. The party may have given up the armed struggle here in Ireland, after said struggle ended in utter failure with Sinn Fein accepting Crown Ministries and the right of Northern Ireland to remain British so long as it desires.
But it has not given up on the notion of idealising and romanticising armed struggle internationally. Sinn Fein looks at others, internationally, turning the living children of their allegedly imperialist and colonialist enemies into the dead children of their allegedly imperialist and colonialist enemies, and it recognises a kindred spirit. That is the raw truth of the matter. There are more than a few small white coffins lying in the soil of this island, and the neighbouring one, on account of Sinn Fein’s own abortive “struggle.” The Shinners see fellas in balaclavas and guns, and they think “there go our people”. It is reflexive. Impulsive. They cannot control it.
The net effect of Mary Lou McDonald’s “principled stand” will not be, and would never be, to change the policy of the United States. It certainly will not change the policy of Israel, which presumably recognises the truth of what I have written in the preceding paragraph more keenly than many Irish people would. The net effect, if there is any, can only be to poison the view of Irish nationalism in the minds of those who currently occupy the White House.
What we know about Donald Trump is that he likes his friends, and that he does not like his enemies. When you align with his enemies, you face the full force of his wrath. Just ask Liz Cheney, who agrees with him on far more than Sinn Fein does.
Sinn Fein’s Gaza Derangement Syndrome, to coin a phrase, does absolutely nothing for the interests of the voters it purports to represent. It can and will do nothing for the inhabitants of the Gaza strip, who are increasingly the voters that it does represent.
Nobody, least of all me, would expect Sinn Fein to change its view on the situation in the Gaza strip. It is entitled to its views.
But its voters – the very people it says have been neglected for years by the British – deserve far more than to be neglected by their own representatives, so that Matt Carthy can chant from a stage that “in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians”.
We are not Palestinians. We are Irish people. And we deserve better than this pathetic embarrassment.