ALEX KANE: Unionists must press home advantage
There are times - actually, far too many for my liking - when you have to wonder if Sinn Fein is serious about the peace process: or even serious about building a political process which will allow the people of Northern Ireland to reach something resembling normal politics.
Michelle O’Neill, their new minister of agriculture said: “We’re not career politicians. We’re republicans, we’re republican activists. That’s what we are about here. We’re not interested in wages or any of that stuff. What’s important to me is delivery of the republican agenda.’ Caral Ni Chuilin, newly appointed to Culture, Arts and Leisure, says, “we are in a post-conflict situation and that’s it,” and then appoints convicted murderer Mary McArdle to help her push through an agenda which includes a more determined promotion of an Irish Language Act.
How can you have genuine power-sharing if Sinn Fein ministers regard their role as the delivery of a purely republican agenda? How can you even speak about a post-conflict society when you make appointments and take decisions whose only purpose is to add salt to the open wounds of those who still suffer? Or, as Ann Travers put it: “We’re not allowed to move on because every time we want to move on Sinn Fein turn the knife a little bit more and we’re asked to accept a little bit more from them.”
Meanwhile, Gerry Kelly reacts to the report on the murder of Rosemary Nelson by refusing to accept its conclusions and insists that ‘collusion’ between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries sanctioned by the British government, of course is the real reason she died. The unspoken irony in all of this is that Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA (always two separate identities, or so they tell us!!) colluded over decades to kill anyone and everyone they defined as a ‘legitimate’ target: yet their key figures refuse to come forward and shed any light at all on their involvement in our collective past.
The problem for Sinn Fein is that their definition of a post-conflict society is one in which the primary causes of the conflict namely, the British and the unionists have either been forced out or politically emasculated. That, as we know (and as the dissident republicans keep reminding them) hasn’t happened. And it isn’t going to happen, either. Sinn Fein has lost the only battle that actually matters to them. The border is still here and Queen Elizabeth is a welcome visitor on both sides of it. President Obama, arguably the most popular politician in the world, stood in Dublin last week and gave his blessing to a partitionist settlement.
What we are seeing now is the dying flames of ‘Provisional’ republicanism. All their key figures are trapped in places like the Dail, Stormont and Westminster: captured, bottled and controlled like the absurd homunculi in Bride of Frankenstein. Oh yes, they still treat us to the graveside orations and the promises of a ‘Nation Once Again,’ yet, to all intents and purposes, history has moved on and delivered a different conclusion.
All of which explains their present actions.
Appointing ‘political prisoners’ to key positions in the Executive is done just to annoy unionists. Appointing Gerry Kelly and Caitriona Ruane to the Policing Board is done just to annoy unionists. Holding on to the Education portfolio is done just to annoy unionists. That’s how pathetic the Sinn Fein agenda has become.
They don’t talk about a Northern Ireland at peace with itself. They don’t talk about bridge-building between both sides as a worthwhile end in its own right. They don’t talk about collective responsibility and an agreed programme for government. Everything they do, everything they say, every appointment they make (be it at Stormont or the local councils) is geared to nothing higher than the annoyance of unionists.
But why annoy unionists, you may ask? Simple: it’s not in Sinn Fein’s longterm interest to make Northern Ireland work. Unity remains their ultimate goal. But Irish unity requires the continuing polarisation of Northern Ireland and the keeping of the constitutional question at the forefront of republican minds. And what better way to promote that sort of self-centred, delusional agenda than by annoying unionists and refusing to make power-sharing a reality? In other words, going out of your way to remind unionists of the brutal realities of the past by putting in office the very people who were convicted and imprisoned for those brutalities.
From Sinn Fein’s perspective the Troops Out mentality has been replaced by a Troops In strategy, in which former terrorists are put in place to annoy unionists and (more cynically desperate still) to try and persuade their own former foot soldiers and the dissidents that all is well with the unity project.
Sinn Fein is incapable of forgiving and equally incapable of forgetting. Sinn Fein refuses to move on, yet expects others to move on. It requires everyone else to sign-up to the mea culpa interpretation of history while continuing to portray itself as more sinned against than sinning. Now, while this may strike most people as a fairly repulsive attitude to adopt, it’s precisely the sort of attitude you would expect the defeated to adopt.
Every single day that a Sinn Fein MLA heads into Stormont, past the statues of Carson and Craigavon, is a daily reminder of how thoroughly and comprehensively they have failed to deliver on their promises. Every orchestrated and repetitive whinge from Gerry Kelly is the clearest possible signal that the journey from the prison cell to the Policing Board represents personal and psychological defeat for him. Let’s be even more frank about it, Martin McGuinness’s descent from Officer-in-Command to Peter’s deputy in this part of the United Kingdom is a pretty graphic calling card from the world of political reality!
In normal circumstances history is written by the winners, yet Sinn Fein’s most remarkable skill has been its ability to mask the fact that it has been stuffed and stuffed on just about every issue that matters to them: their day hasn’t come and isn’t coming. As I noted last week the political advantage is in favour of unionism at the moment and they should do everything necessary to finally press home that advantage.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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