Ben Lowry: It is handy to blame the calculated Bobby Storey IRA funeral breach on the PSNI or Belfast City Council, but it is a much wider scandal

The IRA funeral of Bobby Storey was so flagrant, so calculated, so shameful that of course it is welcome that the PSNI and Belfast City Council are now going to be subject to external investigation.
After her role in the flagrant and calculated IRA funeral breach of social distancing guidance, it is scandal that Michelle O’Neill still has a role in telling the public what it can and cannot doAfter her role in the flagrant and calculated IRA funeral breach of social distancing guidance, it is scandal that Michelle O’Neill still has a role in telling the public what it can and cannot do
After her role in the flagrant and calculated IRA funeral breach of social distancing guidance, it is scandal that Michelle O’Neill still has a role in telling the public what it can and cannot do

Last Saturday on these pages Sam McBride detailed the multiple infractions by republicans (see link below). But even without that detail, the huge scale of the funeral was such an obvious shattering of the limits on gatherings that everyone understood intuitively the wrong that had happened, even if they could not cite the regulations.

(It might be understandable that a physician as professional as the chief medical officer, Dr Michael McBride, on the BBC Nolan Show yesterday did not want to adjudicate on the wrongdoing of one of his political bosses, Michelle O’Neill, but it was very unwise of him to say he had not seen images of the scale of the funeral).

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The huge crowd was an obvious risk as a virus spreading event. There were clearly 1,000+ uniformed participants, and the total crowd, including the people crammed along the footpath, was easily into the thousands.

Can anyone think of a breach of the crowd limits on this scale anywhere on these two islands, of 75 million people, since the last of the sporting events such as Cheltenham in the middle of March?

In the hot weather last month some beaches in southern England are said to have had thousands of people on them, and it did look that way from the images, but even if so it is a different scenario.

People are more spread out on a beach than packed together on a footpath to watch a procession.

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In any event, no political organisation was willing those people on to the beach as some of Sinn Fein did to the funeral. And few individuals heading to the beach, unless heading to an illegal party, can be expected to have known that so many other people were going too.

Sinn Fein does not even have Donald Trump’s feeble excuse for holding crowded rallies, of an almost anti scientific, denialist approach to Covid.

Sinn Fein’s ministers were the opposite, issuing lockdown orders, which led to hundreds of people being fined and others losing their livelihoods, The party almost paralysed Stormont in their bid for even tougher rules, and delayed access to cemeteries until they got pressure from their own Catholic base (making the hypocrisy of their conduct at Milltown and Roselawn all the greater).

It ought not to be necessary to keep underlining the comprehensive nature of the republican breach in west Belfast on June 30, ahead of their special treatment hours later in the east of the city at Roselawn, but it is necessary, given that their apologists have been ceaselessly trying to move the story on.

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But the inquiries into the role of Belfast City Council and the PSNI in this saga, while important, means that the focus shifts on to specific failures in those two organisations, and might well lead to disciplinary action or resignations by officials within them.

If that is what happens, and things end there, then it will be a grave, grave injustice for those individuals, who will have good reason to feel that they were fall guys.

Such an outcome would mean that the focus is diverted away from where it should be, which in the first instance is Sinn Fein, and in the second instance is the culture of pandering to republicans, such as Stormont’s quiet changing of Covid advice just after the Storey funeral to make it seem less bad.

It has been going on for years, and is all part of a desperate bid to get republicans to stay in the system, as Owen Polley wrote on these pages on Thursday (see link below).

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Michelle O’Neill has in recent days been tweeting out upbeat messages about further easing of restrictions around Covid-19 or the local decline in the pandemic.

It might be that she just isn’t the sort of person who feels mortified at her own profound hypocrisy, in being a leading presence at such a massive funeral and so shattering almost everything that she scolded the public about for three months.

We know that some politicians are incapable of embarrassment and shame, although I do not think she gives out that vibe — rather one of utter lack of authority amid much more powerful people within her movement.

But regardless of what Ms O’Neill feels, it is a scandal of immense proportions that she is allowed to have any role whatsoever in the rules on what a hitherto obedient public can and cannot do.

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It is a standing disgrace from the very top of government that she is still in a position to do this.

The refusal of Arlene Foster to share a platform with her at any future Covid press conferences, while appropriate, sidesteps the much deeper issue of Ms O’Neill continuing to hold her position after the Storey mass breach outrage.

It is self evident that Sinn Fein since 1998, when they first came into power, has been allowed to behave in ways that other parties are not allowed (or even inclined) to behave.

It is much harder to say what to do about it. Unionists are almost powerless in the face of perpetually weak and often uniterested UK governments, and relentlessly partisan Irish ones.

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Unionism has been moving away from the idea of ‘unionist unity’. Recent elections have shown that if unionists formed a coalition that was associated with loyalist symbolism it would just reduce unionism to a rump of a third or so of the overall vote in Northern Ireland.

If Foyle was a disastrous result for Sinn Fein in the December general election, then South Belfast was its unionist counterpart.

But it is not inconceivable that a time would come in which the full range of unionism, including its most moderate voices at Stormont, would say: “We just can’t acquiesce in this special treatment for Sinn Fein any more, and will collectively have to go into opposition to it.”

The obvious argument against this is that London would just push towards something akin to joint authority. But what if Northern Ireland is in any event being dismantled by a thousand cuts?

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Yet many people in London, Dublin and indeed nationalism in Northern Ireland clearly see what Sinn Fein is up to, and do not like it.

A further possible group of allies against one-way concessions to republicans is Alliance voters.

Pundits seem to assume that the drift to that party is permanent, and it might well be if unionism continues to appear to be unattractive.

That centrist party’s new voters have partly come from traditional nationalist areas, but above all from the party’s strongholds around Belfast.

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It is a group of voters with whom I am familiar, having grown up around them. Many of them are apolitical, and they dislike traditional unionism. They hated Brexit. But they loathe republicanism too, and they are not fooled into thinking the movement ‘woke’.

The funeral scandal showed that there is a large majority of people in Northern Ireland against such sectarian and hypocritical and irresponsible conduct.

Whether it can ever be harnessed to stop the appeasement of Sinn Fein is another matter.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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• Owen Polley: The Bobby Storey IRA funeral was reminder of who is in charge of NIJuly 9

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