Republicans will mourn most at PUP's demise
DAWN Purvis decided that the PUP was a lost cause.
UVF criminality made a mockery of the party's language of 'conflict transformation' and threatened an already doubtful political future.
An astute and intelligent politician, Purvis decided to jump ship before it was too late. But the problems for the PUP and Purvis are deeper than the issues of UVF violence.
Although the PUP predated the peace process, such attention and support that it attained was largely due to its functionality in the governments' strategy of 'bringing in the extremes'.
At a crucial time in 1998 its two MLAs gave pro-Agreement unionism a narrow majority in the Assembly. The party was always more popular with the media than its tiny support would seem to have justified.
The reason for this is that its ideology recycled a hackneyed piece of leftist 'analysis' of unionism. It is there in the PUP's website where it claims to have emerged from 'decades of under and mis-representation' of the unionist working class by traditional unionist parties'.
In other words working class Protestants who voted for the main unionist parties were led astray and their true progressive instincts betrayed by politicians.
It is little wonder that leading members of Sinn Fein have been so fulsome in their tributes to the late David Ervine and Dawn Purvis.
For at the core of the PUP world view is the essentially self-pitying and morally exculpatory mantra that the resort to violence by paramilitaries during the Troubles was an inevitable response to oppressive social and economic conditions and the sectarian rallying cries of politicians. Many of those who joined republican and loyalist paramilitary groups did come from deprived backgrounds and were often young and impressionable.
However, as Richard Evans, the noted historian of Nazism, has written: “A murderer is a murderer, however persuasive the mitigating circumstances…”
Purvis has been a fan of the Eames-Bradley report and Bradley in an address to the PUP on dealing with the past used it to lambast mainstream unionism for its hostility to the report.
No doubt he was speaking to the converted.
With the Saville report about to be published we can be sure that the conflict over dealing with the past will intensify and the PUP has done nothing to challenge the dominance of republican and neo-nationalist views on truth recovery.
Sinn Fein, constitutionally tethered within the UK, shows no sign of letting up in its campaign to ‘green’ collective mentalities in Northern Ireland.
Caitriona Ruane has just launched a new resource for school children doing key stage four.
Entitled ‘From prison to peace: building on experience’ it was produced by a partnership of community and former prisoner groups from “all sides of the community”.
According to the minister it has a strong emphasis on anti-sectarianism and anti-racism.
No hint of a strong emphasis on anti-violence or victims.
This sounds like a self-justificatory travesty of the role of paramilitaries during the Troubles.
Unfortunately for Dawn Purvis and the PUP, despite a worthy commitment to improve the conditions of the worst off sections of the Protestant working class, they became de facto allies for the republican movement’s campaign to indoctrinate a new generation.
The failure of the PUP to make a breakthrough reflects more than the link with the UVF.
A party whose core analysis has treated its target constituency as the dupes of other unionist politicians need not expect to be rewarded at election time.
• Professor Henry Patterson is professor of politics at the University of Ulster
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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