Reading Mary Lou McDonald’s interview with the Sunday Business Post I was left pondering as to the source of her authority to decide who is entitled to call themselves an Irish nationalist or republican.
“I would simply say that anybody who understands Irish nationalism, Irish liberation politics, Irish republicanism, will know from its foundations it has always been internationalist in its view,” she said, adding that those who used the Irish flag and nationalist language in campaigns on immigration were not nationalists.
Is she claiming that Sinn Féin has the franchise on the brand? That only those who are members or supporters of the party are entitled to describe themselves as republicans?
In the past, the IRA Army Council did in effect consider itself to be the Government of the Republic from whence, as ratified in the establishment of the Republic in 1916 and approved by the people in 1918, it claimed to have a mandate to defend and re-establish that Republic in arms.
But Sinn Féin have long abandoned that pretence, recognising the Northern Ireland state – including taking seats in Stormont and thereby recognising the legitimacy of Partition, and supporting the administration of the six counties as a part of the United Kingdom.
Mary Lou appears to be basing her claim upon the belief – to paraphrase one of our great national poets – that: “You can’t be opposed to mass immigration and be a republican/nationalist.”
Yet opposing immigration is something which Mary Lou herself has been recently accused of when pitching as she has been in the red tops and elsewhere to the “workers” and marginalised indigenes.
The electoral game plan would appear to consist of tooting on the equality dog whistle for the bourgeois liberals who she fears might be drifting back to their natural home amidst the soft left Labour Soc Dems and are who are not much bothered about houses and stuff because they have at least one home as well as a “social conscience.”.
But Sinn Féin also need to blow the “we don’t support open borders” and “consultation” dog whistle for the proles who associate the lack of housing, hospital beds and so on with the large numbers of people who have come from overseas to place further demands on these provisions.
So, the best way to view all of this and the conflicting signals emerging from a poll-panicked Sinn Féin “core group” is in terms of their voter base. All large parties have to appeal to differing constituencies but the exponential growth of the Shinners has cast a very wide net that includes relatively few long-time loyalists.
For years they have managed, like the successful bigamist, to avoid their old missus at home in the council house ever meeting the younger mistress who they only see at cool stuff.
Then comes the day when they all meet in the vegetable aisle in Tescos. Or outside the IPAS accommodation centre perhaps. What to do, what to do…. And never even mind the wifey/mistressy voters, there are siblings and offspring and orphans who suddenly realise over the family dinner that one or the other is a “racist” or a Wokey “band wagoner.”
Whispers which have reached these ears indicate that it may well be the internal Tolstoyan unhappy family part that proves to be Sinn Féin’s biggest concern. Members of the parliamentary party and staff in Leinster House were unhappy with the decision to call for the resignation of Minister for Justice Helen McEntee and Garda Commissioner Drew Harris in the wake of the Dublin riot, on the basis that this might have been interpreted as taking the side of the “fash.”
There was also disquiet over the scripts prepared for the Sinn Féin TDs who spoke during the Rural Independent private members debate on immigration in November.
I have heard that some TDS indicated that they were not prepared to speak during the debate if the emphasis was on, as it was, Sinn Féin’s claim no longer to be supportive of unlimited “open borders” immigration.
Watch that space as we approach the local and European elections and which candidates, especially in the latter, might demur from the new Party line on immigration as enunciated by the Core Group.
Back to Mary Lou’s historical take on what constitutes Irish republicanism and nationalism. She uses the terms interchangeably as most people have done, although they are not synonymous nor did Irish nationalism begin, as she seems to imply, in 1916 nor even with the republican United Irishmen.
The Proclamation itself makes that apparent when it refers to the legitimacy of the Rising itself resting on the fact that “In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.”
Three of those occasions were the Ulster Gaelic nobility-led attempt of the 1590s to drive the Protestant settlers out with the aid of the Spanish Catholic monarchy; the 1641 alliance of the Gaelic nation and the assimilated or semi-assimilated Catholic descendants of the Norman conquest, and Cogadh na Dhá Rí in which the remnants of that nation fought on the side of King James in the last desperate attempt to overthrow the colony.
The Jacobitism of that period founded on the hope for aid from the Catholic nations of Europe was more a part of the motivation for the Gaelic “peasants” who did rise in 1798 than the Jacobinism of the Dublin and Belfast United Irish leaders who in large part betrayed those same peasants when it came down to it.
A similar revisionism has been evident in other leftist takes on Irish history over the years. In his book on “left republicanism,” Eoin Ó Broin deploys a half-baked English Marxist perspective that places Irish history within the context of “the failure of the English Glorious Revolution to resolve questions of land, property and liberty in Ireland as they were part of the broader European bourgeois challenge to the feudal relations of the old order.”
Which, apart from being comically awry, logically places Cromwell on the “progressive” republican side of history, and his Catholic “feudal” opponents like Eoghan Ruadh on the “reactionary” side. And thus, the mahogany gaspipe jabbering “mass of Irish peasants,” to quote comrade Ó Broin, blundered about in the obscurantist priest-ridden feudal mist until the smart lads from Trinners and Belfast arrived to lift the veils of ignorance from their eyes.
While there might have been an excuse for English Communists who peddled this line to gullible IRA men in the 1960s due to their complete ignorance of Gaelic Irish history, there can be none for their marks.
The origin of Irish nationalism lies in the quest for the overturning of the colony and the destruction of the Gaelic nation and the anglicisation of its remnants. Nebulous concepts such as “equality” and “internationalism” had no part in any of that beyond the Irish nation and its people regaining its place as an equal of all other sovereign nations.
Internationalism meant no more than seeking the practical assistance of people with whom we share, and shared, a common European Catholic heritage – one that long predates the technocratic EU to which Sinn Féin also now genuflects. There was no plan to replace the English colony with settlers from France or Spain or any of their colonies in the Americas or Africa.
The “right wing” nationalism decried by “left republicans” and others may appear atavistic and repellent to them. It always has, because however incoherently and ineloquently it has sometimes been expressed over the centuries, it represents the instinctive reaction of what remains of that Gaelic nation.
That nation appears not yet resigned to the historical fate envisaged for “the mass of peasants” so much despised by Marx and his disciples, even those of them who have only read the “For Dummies” version.