Alex Kane: Gerry Kelly tweet a sign of growing Sinn Fein frustration at stalling unity progress

‘37 years ago 38 Irish Republican prisoners were getting into a lorry at H7 and heading to the front gate of Long Kesh and freedom. One of Big Bob’s best ops! I had the privilege of the front passenger seat. Well someone had to check we were taking the right route out!!’

A few months ago we had John O’Dowd describing members of the UK government as a shower of ‘bastards’. Then Martina Anderson’s tweet about ‘pensions mainly for those who fought Britain’s dirty war in Ireland ... mainly to discriminate and criminalise and exclude’. And let’s not forget Michelle O’Neill’s rolling insistence that she, along with key figures in Sinn Fein, had acted perfectly acceptably at the time of the Bobby Storey (Big Bob) funeral.

So Gerry Kelly’s jokey – which is what it was intended to be – tweet about a mass escape by terrorists (during which prison officers were stabbed, shot – by Kelly – and beaten) was par for the course. Now, whatever else may be said about him, Kelly is not a stupid man. He’s not the sort of person who tweets something like that without being aware of the consequences and the almost certain response to it. And was it, I wonder, mere coincidence, that the reference to Storey follows hard on the heels of O’Neill having to backtrack a bit on the funeral arrangements?

Worryingly, I think he will have banked the response from Secretary of State Brandon Lewis as a bonus: ‘This is disgraceful. Such shameful and gratuitous incitement makes it harder for all communities in Northern Ireland to move forward. It is right to expect so much more from elected representatives.’

Kelly may not have anticipated such a blunt response from Lewis (and I wonder, by the way, if he had to be prompted by Arlene Foster or others) but he will have lapped it up: because a secretary of state made angry by Gerry Kelly is exactly the sort of thing that the party’s core base also laps up.

I was struck, too, by the response from junior minister Declan Kearney (who, a few years ago, fronted Sinn Fein’s reconciliation outreach to unionism): “We all have narratives around our past, the conflict that we’ve lived through the last hundred years. Those narratives are in conflict with each other. We need, particularly in the context of this mandate of renewed power sharing, to come together on the basis of respecting different narratives, to agree to disagree. We will not agree on the past but we can do our level best collectively, inclusively to try and build a united future for everyone in this society ... develop a new dialogue and discourse within our society about how in fact we can build for the future.”

Hmmm. That, as well Kearney knows (for he isn’t a stupid man, either), is nonsense. If we cannot agree on the past how do we ‘respect’ different narratives, particularly when the narrative we disagree with is in complete conflict with and contradiction to our own? How could any unionist ‘respect’ Sinn Fein’s narrative? And I’ve never met any member of Sinn Fein (even in a below-the-radar discussion) who ‘respects’ my narrative as a unionist. Oh yes, they might acknowledge that it is my narrative, but it never goes further than acknowledgment.

My reading of Kearney’s response to a question he was asked (by Jim Allister, I think) about Kelly’s tweet was that he seemed to be arguing that Kelly had nothing to apologise for. He has his own narrative and, according to Kearney, it is a narrative that should be respected by unionists. So what are unionists complaining about? Why don’t they just shut up and focus on a ‘new dialogue and discourse’ about building a spanky new ‘unified future’ with Sinn Fein?

Another thing which has struck me over the past few months is that the offensive tweets and actions seem to be a very deliberate strategy by Sinn Fein. Why? Because, 25 years after the peace process started, there isn’t a united Ireland: and it was the promise of a united Ireland which was the primary selling point to the ‘volunteers’ and grassroots in 1998. As Gerry Adams wrote at the time: ‘Sinn Fein wants to demolish physical, psychological and political barriers that divide the people of this island. These barriers are very much the legacy of our past, of continued jurisdiction in Ireland and of partition. The peace process is about tearing down these barriers.’

Yet, after 25 years, there is still partition: Northern Ireland is still in UK; there is no certainty of a border poll; no certainty of winning one, anyway; Sinn Fein is still co-governing Northern Ireland with the DUP; there is no significant push for unity from the Irish establishment. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This peace process strategy has now lasted almost as long as the overall armed struggle phase; and certainly longer than the armalite/ballot box phase, which began in 1981. And Sinn Fein is still waiting. And waiting ...

But I sense a growing impatience within Sinn Fein. They’ve upped the ante when it comes to trolling unionists online. There’s a nastiness there which wasn’t there 10 years ago. They don’t even disguise their anger anymore. The unionist outreach/reconciliation phase is over. And while Brexit may annoy a section of unionism (not just small-u unionism, either) there isn’t much in the way of compelling evidence to suggest that annoyance/anger would translate into a vote for Irish unity in a border poll.

Which leads to an obvious conclusion: the tweets, the Storey funeral, the commemoration for fallen volunteers et al, are intended to wind-up unionists; with the predictable responses from unionism regarded as a job well done. It’s about feeding and reassuring a republican base which, deep down, is probably wondering when its day will come. It’s just another way of marketing their narrative – which they’re perfectly at liberty to do. Just don’t pretend it’s about ‘collectively, inclusively’ trying to build a united future.