Ben Lowry: Instead of ‘moving on’ from the IRA funeral, we still need proper answers into the scandal

There is an example above, a ‘Penrose steps’, named after a psychiatrist and mathematician.

I presume that such images become of interest to older children when they reach a stage where they move beyond an instinctive grasp of space to a more critical one.

Such drawings are intriguing and also, in their physical impossibility, unsettling.

What has happened with the Bobby Storey funeral is similar.

With the publication of last week’s Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) report, it is as if we have wandered up an impossible staircase that somehow brings us back to where we began.

The funeral itself was easy to understand. As I keep writing and saying in broadcasts, an intelligent child would have grasped it all.

Sinn Fein were at the helm of a huge funeral for an IRA godfather in west Belfast. It was a flagrant breach of the limit of 30 mourners at a funeral, a limit that had been lower earlier in lockdown.

Aside from the law, the gathering was a massive, aggressive breach of the spirit of social distancing.

While the UK and Ireland were both then emerging from lockdown it was probably the biggest gathering of people in the British Isles, of 70 million people, since sport festivals such as Cheltenham in March.

Aerial photographs of the IRA funeral snaking through west Belfast show it was at least as large as Black Lives Matter rallies in London or the crowds on beaches in southern England when weather got hot.

And there at the helm of it was Sinn Fein’s president, Mary Lou McDonald, who hopes to be Taoiseach, and Stormont leader, Michelle O’Neill, the deputy first minister.

SF has been sanctimonious about lockdown throughout, and tried to force closure of NI schools in mid March 2020, in line with the Republic. The party was scathing about Tory handling of Covid, and has ever since wanted a slow lockdown exit (unless southern rules ease, in which case it wants NI to match that).

Yet few people were surprised that police facilitated their funeral. It seemed clear from TV on the day.

It was, all in all, a breathtaking display of arrogance, entitlement and republican exceptionalism. It also showed confidence that this defiance of both the spirit and letter of the rules around mass gatherings and funerals would be met with no sanction. As, indeed, it ultimately met with no sanction.

So go back for a moment and think about the smart primary school child, of an age that is able to ponder impossible shapes.

Children of that age will remember this last year for the rest of their lives. They have lived through a lockdown that even adults currently in their 90s had not before seen.

They have learned about behaving in ways that minimise risk and show consideration for others.

Such a child will have seen the stark wrongness of what happened on June 30. Plenty of such children will have lost grandparents during lockdown, so they will have understood what an insult the Storey funeral was to the 25,000+ people who have died in NI since March last year (mostly not of Covid), almost all of whose relatives obediently followed funeral guidance.

A child of that age will have understood how remarkable it is that a deputy first minister, who to this day tells us all what we can and cannot do — a decision making power that can ruin law abiding businesses – remains defiant about her role.

Yet probes into this affair have been like impossible steps.

For all the legalese, sub-clauses, grave language, hand wringing and stamp of officialdom, the reports in totality have failed to adjudicate as wrong that which children could see as wrong.

Prosecutors say the law was all too complicated, even for those SF politicians who helped make it. HMIC agrees with that.

Prosecutors also say that the PSNI facilitation of the funeral helped make prosecutions impossible. Police say that they had to engage with organisers, for reasons such as safety. HMIC agree with that too.

Belfast City Council’s report says republicans did not put pressure on the council to close Roselawn for the IRA funeral. Perhaps we should assume it just happened.

HMIC say there was no pro republican bias because a loyalist funeral would have been treated the same.

Thus the rest of us are left to conclude that it is a coincidence that the republican movement, which has been so inclined to flex its muscles over the decades, got away with such a flagrant breach.

And to conclude that the question of 1,000 uniformed stewards on that day is a matter not worthy of investigation or explanation.

And to overlook the fact that Stormont rules mysteriously changed hours before the funeral.

Thank goodness Stephen Nolan has taken on a role that investigative wings of the BBC should have done, and ignored cries to “move on” over this saga, and its shocking implications for the rule of law at a time of great community tension.

Thank goodness the Ulster Unionist Party, which has stood out against the pro terrorist direction of legacy and against the blackmail of keeping down of Stormont until there is an Irish language act, is now saying that this saga needs a judge-led inquiry.

Let us hope that any such probe does not just add a further impossible level to the staircase.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry: If Joel Keys, 19, wants to help unionism he should get a law degree

Other articles by Ben Lowry below, and beneath that information on how to subscribe to the News Letter:

• Ben Lowry May 15: Edwin Poots and Doug Beattie will offer two distinct shades of unionism

• Ben Lowry May 8: Formal UK ideas for an amnesty are almost exactly 20 years old

• Ben Lowry May 8: Let us hope that the brilliant Eoghan Harris keeps on writing

• Ben Lowry May 1: Unionism can’t just be about managing long-term defeat

• Ben Lowry May 1: Arlene Foster was given huge opportunity by DUP after her exit helped ruin UUP

• Ben Lowry April 24: NI seems to rely increasingly on just one pollster for data on attitudes to a border poll

• Ben Lowry April 17: DUP still has to choose between managing this disaster or total rejection of it

• Ben Lowry April 10: His enduring marriage to the Queen was key to our understanding of Prince Philip

• Ben Lowry April 3: Radio grilling of UUP leader exposed folly of unionists blaming Simon Byrne for funeral

• Ben Lowry Mar 27: There should not be an Irish language act, but it is too late — the DUP has agreed one

• Ben Lowry Mar 20: We have made it through the worst of the dark, dreaded winter lockdown

• Ben Lowry Mar 20: MLAs lost control of abortion by rejecting modest law reform

• Ben Lowry Mar 13: Whatever future Boris Johnson adopts for Northern Ireland seems set to lead to a crisis

• Ben Lowry Mar 13: Scotland tunnel isn’t fantasy, but something kids of today might see

• Ben Lowry Mar 6: The cost of victims’ pension has ballooned without explanation as to why 


• Ben Lowry Feb 27: Unionists have fully turned against Irish Sea border because they’ve seen the scale of disaster

• Ben Lowry Feb 20: We still lack answers as to why IRA funeral got special treatment at Roselawn

• Ben Lowry Feb 13: Peter Robinson has long experience of what is and is not politically feasible

• Ben Lowry Feb 6: There is barely any unionist support for violence, despite justified anger at sea border

• Ben Lowry Jan 30: At last, clear reason for UK and unionists to stop being weak towards Ireland/EU

• Ben Lowry Jan 23: Lockdown sceptics have been undermined by crazy theories, but sensible criticisms haven’t gone away

• Ben Lowry Jan 16: The Irish Sea border was imposed because UK knew unionists would take it

• Ben Lowry in 2020: Last night unionists celebrated a move towards Irish unity

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