Voters in the Republic ‘should be marched past IRA’s bodies’ says veteran Irish commentator

Eoghan Harris, a former socialist and one-time republican who has become a fierce critic of Sinn Fein, was scathing about the party’s rise in his weekly column yesterday in The Sunday Independent.

Mr Harris, who helped to advise the then Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble in the 1990s, was writing before any results in Saturday’s general election, but reiterated his warnings to southern voters about Sinn Fein’s rise.

“One of the most indelible images of the Holocaust shows American GIs escorting shocked and sobbing German civilians past piled skeletal bodies in a concentration camp,” he wrote. “March them past the bodies. The [Irish] general election proved this is the best way to protect this gullible generation from the poison of SF, the puppet party of the Provisional army council.”

Mr Harris criticised various media outlets, including some RTE programmes, for failing to confront Sinn Fein leaders on past IRA terror and it past victims “like Frank Hegarty and Patsy Gillespie”.

He added: “But when Miriam O’Callaghan, showing great courage did so [in the 2011 presidential eletion], [Martin] McGuinness dropped his mask and we saw his real face.”

The pattern of failing to confront SF had been repeated in this election, Mr Harris said, saying some outlets were “slow to catch up with Breege Quinn [mother of Paul] story”.

Various broadcast panels “were all smiles” to the idea that excluding SF was a moral issue.

“Last Monday night’s Irish Times poll showing Sinn Fein ahead of Fianna Fail caused them to explode with premature ejaculations that FF and FG were toast. Chief among them was Fintan O’Toole who told us Sinn Fein could no longer be excluded from government.”

He described Sinn Fein as a right-wing nationalist party “for all its socialist rhetoric”.

“Sinn Fein is the only European party with an armed wing – marking us out as a rogue democracy. Sinn Fein persistently demonises a minority ethnic group – Northern Protestants.

“Sinn Fein agitates about ‘its’ ethnic group in an adjoining region to stir up trouble in its own version of the Sudetenland. SF promotes a martyrology around sectarian IRA killers akin to that around the Nazi thug, Horst Wessel.

“Sinn Fein peddles a heroic false narrative about its squalid terrorist past to seduce a younger generation.”

He concluded that the Quinn story “is a warning to RTE: there are more bodies ready to rise from the past – even if RTE don’t allow me on air to point them out”.