While Ireland has a deserved reputation for arts and literature, we sometimes forget that we also do a fine line in political humbug.
In fairness, politics and humbug are close friends in most countries, but we can certainly hold our own with the best.
This week, for example, Sinn Féin TD, Brian Stanley, was heavily criticised for tweeting that the 1920 Kilmichael ambush and the 1979 Narrow Water bombing “taught the elite of the British army and the establishment the cost of occupying Ireland.” (It didn’t, because the last time I looked the British were still here. But let’s skip that bit.)
His tweet caused apoplexy in Fine Gael, “shock and dismay”in Fianna Fáil and prompted Arlene Foster to complain about his “warped views” to the Dáil. Michelle O’Neill said it was “insensitive”, because old battles should not be refought (that’s the end of the Easter commemorations then) and later Mr Stanley himself also said it was “insensitive” (presumably he was handed the same script as Michelle O’Neill received.)
So was he wrong to commemorate the Kilmichael ambush, in which the IRA, led by former British Army corporal Tom Barry, killed 16 RIC Auxillaries? (Another one escaped but was later captured, beaten to death and buried in a bog.)
You might suggest that he was wrong to commemorate a battle, marked (like all battles) by violent death. But the Irish state, SF and FF all commemorate the Easter Rising annually, in which 260 civilians and 143 British soldiers were killed.
Indeed, without Kilmichael and other violent deaths, there might well be no Dáil today and its main parties all have violent pasts. Fine Gael’s political forefathers executed 77 republicans during the Civil War (the British executed 24 in the War for Independence). FF’s de Valera executed six IRA men, including Paddy McGrath, who had fought in 1916. (Does FF’s Easter commemoration include him?) And, of course, SF defends the IRA’s “Brits Out” war in which 3,500 died.
The important point, you say, is that all their commemorations should be inclusive. But why then was the British ambassador not included in Dublin’s recent Bloody Sunday commemorations?
Only the 14 Croke Park deaths were remembered and not the 15 others who were killed by the IRA that day, including British intelligence agents, RIC Auxiliaries and civilians. Stanley’s tweet was in line with those commemorations.
But, said Mary Lou McDonald, Stanley’s mistake “was to attempt to draw historical comparison” between an event in the 1920s and one in the 1970s. But surely that comparison lies at the heart of Sinn Féin’s support for the IRA, especially since Ms McDonald’s pronouncement of Tiocfaidh ár lá (which always sounds unconvincing in a Dublin middle class accent) implies that Narrow Water was a stepping stone to expected victory?
Certainly those who founded the PIRA in 1969 claimed they intended to finish the War for Independence. (They did finish it, but not in the way they intended.). The latter-day romanticism of the 1920s fuelled much of what happened here from 1970 onwards, including the shameful practice of burying people in bogs. (The romanticism of war increases proportionately with the time elapsed since the war ended.)
Stanley’s comments come at a time of heightened nationalism in Ireland. His mistake was to lack the subtlety of RTE’s programmes on re-fighting the War for Independence and Fine Gael’s refined anti-Britishness over Brexit. He just said what his party has always said it believes, but he forgot (or someone prompted him not to remember) there was a more artful way to disguise it.
Conscious of this, other parties seized the opportunity to ignore their own violent origins and to push Sinn Féin into saying that it doesn’t believe what it has said it believes and thus accuse it of political humbug. Which shows just how much political humbug there is in Irish politics.
