Sinn Fein’s activists in ‘deep denial’?
For those with some Irish, this interview with Eoghan Harris on last Monday’s Blas is well worth a listen. But so is this piece from Liam Clarke, who witnessed Harris’s performance at West Belfast Talks Back. Considering his claim to political consistency is his opposition to the Sinn Fein project, he was, by most accounts fairly gentle in his criticism. What seems to have struck Clarke more than anything Harris said was that “Sinn Fein activists are in deep denial. They won’t even admit where they are politically. If you don’t know where you are now, it’s going to be hard to find a way forward.”By Liam Clarke
Could Sinn Fein and Christian churches become new projects for Eoghan Harris, a newly appointed senator in the republic? Speaking as part
of a panel at the West Belfast festival last Wednesday, he proclaimed his intention of re-creating and redefining republicanism for the 21st century and referred on a number of occasions to the importance of Christian values.
The Christian bit was a surprise. The last time Harris wrote about spirituality it was to recommend the message of Tibetan Buddhism. All the same, he has a strong record of spotting and shaping trends in public opinion.
He doesn’t always get it right,
of course. While working as an
adviser to Fine Gael he famously introduced an off-colour comedy sketch by Twink into one section
of party leader John Bruton’s
televised address. Overall, though, his record is impressive. He generally calls Irish elections right and often throws in his lot with the winning side.
Harris spotted Mary Robinson’s potential to win the Irish presidency when few others did, and gave her the crucial advice she needed to kill off her frumpy, woolly jumper image. He groomed Proinsias De Rossa for government and, in the most recent election, spotted the fact that Fianna Fail could win and intervened to give Bertie Ahern crucial backing on the Late Late Show. Last week a Red C poll for the Sunday Business Post showed one-fifth of Fianna Fail voters said they had been influenced by his statements.
That’s why the notion of a Christian republicanism emerging in
Ireland cannot be discounted. Neither can Harris’s bold prediction that Sinn Fein will lose all its seats to Fianna Fail in the next Irish general election and that the party should concentrate its efforts on the north. It was bitter advice, especially since Gerry Adams, who masterminded Sinn Fein’s southern election strategy, was sitting in the audience.
The statement brought Dr Jude Collins, a University of Ulster academic and former Daily Ireland columnist, to his feet and Sinn Fein’s defence. Collins waved a £100 note (assuring everyone it wasn’t from the Northern Bank) and offered to bet Harris was wrong. Harris took the bet. “What odds will you give me? I suggest you start at 10-1,” said Collins.
“I’ll give you 10-1,” Harris replied. “I’d have given you 100-1 if you had asked for it.” Collins, no mean debater, was left asking if he could have 100-1 after all. “Not now you can’t,” replied Harris, laughing.
The suspicion that Harris might be right about Sinn Fein’s fate deepened when Catriona Ruane, Sinn Fein’s Mayo-born education minister at Stormont, predicted Sinn Fein would go from strength to strength, but then refused to put any money on it. Harris goaded her: “In the southern election you were put out of business.” Ruane told Martina Purdy, the BBC journalist chairing the event, that she didn’t gamble.
Adams, who won money from Barney Eastwood when he took his West Belfast seat from the Social Democratic and Labour party’s Dr Joe Hendron, also kept his hands in his pockets.
The next step in Adams’s strategy involves a breakthrough in the south. That is why he did not take a ministry in Stormont. Instead, he visited every constituency in the last Dail election and dominated Sinn Fein’s slots on RTE’s party political broadcasts.
Last week, though, Sinn Fein’s contribution to the debate looked increasingly tired and formulaic. The party appeared lost and fell back on slogans. One man in the audience proclaimed, with a cheer, that the British Army had admitted “the IRA was unbeatable”.
Edwin Poots, a Democratic Unionist minister who might have been expected to react with apoplexy to that boast, instead gave an unemotional account of the main phases of the IRA campaign before pronouncing evenly that “by the late 1980s the IRA was stuffed”. He said it was no surprise they hated Special Branch so much, given the extent to which it had infiltrated the IRA.
Poots went on to praise Adams for giving Ian Paisley most of what he had asked for. Harris also praised Adams for his “epic” achievement in bringing the IRA campaign to an end and weaning his supporters away from the gun.
Harris went on to refer to his key role in weaning the Official Republican movement away from violence and said it made him admire Adams’s skill in achieving the same thing with a larger movement.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light. Martin Meehan, an IRA veteran from Ardoyne, described Harris as an embarrassment, accusing him of being ashamed to admit he had taken the IRA oath. Meehan, a republican legend in his day, compared his life of violent struggle and his years in jail to that of Harris, drifting from one political home to another.
The directness of Harris’s reply was cruel. “What’s bothering you is that you did not get what you wanted to get after 30 years. Now you are taking out your spleen on someone like me who copped on early that this was a dead end,” he said, denying he had ever joined the IRA.
Several IRA veterans, including Jim “Flash” McVeigh, the last OC of Provisional IRA prisoners in the Maze, sat in the audience. Not one of them stood to say the campaign had been worthwhile or that their years of violence, jail and sacrifice had been justified by the outcome Adams had negotiated. Harris’s advice was to move on, put it behind them and focus on the political opportunities ahead rather than the wrongs of the past.
There are no signs Sinn Fein is prepared to take this advice just yet. Today Adams will be the main speaker at a “March for Truth”, which culminates in a rally at Belfast city hall. Held under the banner of the National Hunger Strike Committee, it will attempt to conjure up the sense of purpose felt by republicans during the 1981 hunger strike, by wearing the black armbands used back then by supporters of the prison protest.
In the past, holding such an event in the centre of Belfast, highlighting collusion by the security forces with loyalists and ignoring the fact the IRA killed half of those who died in the Troubles, would have sparked outrage from unionists. Today, even in the August silly season, commentators are predicting neither trouble nor much interest.
When Adams was interviewed about it on the BBC a caller asked him how he expected to be taken seriously when he called for a truth commission when he wouldn’t even admit he had been in the IRA. Judging by the debate, Sinn Fein activists are in deep denial. They won’t even admit where they are politically.
If you don’t know where you are now, it’s going to be hard to find a way forward.
First published in the Sunday Times…
>>Elenwe claims in good evangelical fashion to be disgusted but is obviously most flattered. She laughed even more though at the prospect of me being a handyman, more handless man.< <
Ahhhh, a man after my own heart. Although in truth i am improving. So you are faced with being put up by an unrepentant fenian B, sending your wife into the clutches of another Welsh Tom Jones (well you saw the youtube video's) with those snake hips. Or be in the driving seat deciding the future of your native land.
No brainer! my weans would probably just lead yours astray anyhow, you know have them singing rebel songs and saying the catechism. And as for Dewi, well the least said the better. As for Elenwe and her evangelical disgust, check the comment by Joe Dyke, i didn't know wether to be titillated or disgusted myself;
http://sluggerotoole.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the-cost-of-running-slugger/P25/
It’s well that it was 4.28am and a fair bit of drink may have been consumed. Sadly now when I am up at 4.28am it is usually cleaning up vomit and changing sheets because of children’s illnesses.
Slug
Were an Assembly election held tomorrow, they would be East Belfast 2, North Down 2 and East Derry 1.
In 2011, we may be looking at a different picture, depending on precise boundary changes, development of the youth wing, etc.
But as per my earlier post, it is exceptionally difficult for a party to break through in an area where it has little or no tradition.
Dubliner:
I’d be more interested to know why he thinks that a government that is characterised by “corruption, mismanagement, economic backwardness†could produce one of the world’s most economically successful and multicultural and pluralist societies in record time from a post-colonial starting point of absolute penury.
The answer is fairly simple : by happy accident. The first five decades of the existence of the Irish State, which were dominated by Fianna Fail, were characterised by backwardness, economic sluggishness, and of course very high emigration. You can’t praise the government for fostering an economic boom without blaming them for their failure to do so for decades.
The logic seems to be that bad governments produce great economies.
Robert Mugabe might have something to say about that.
Or perhaps it means that brilliant economies are self-creating entities that exist independently of the management of government?
I wouldn’t argue that it is that simple. But it is even more simplistic to give FF the credit for today’s economic success.
In which case, it doesn’t matter who we elect, does it?
It certainly doesn’t seem to matter to a certain section of the Irish people, who would vote for a dead sheep if it sported a Fianna Fail rosette.
Where are SF now- simple;
1. Under a penetrated, corrupt and incompetent leadership.
2. Losing party activists.
3. Melting down in Dublin.
4. Trapped in Stormont.
5. Getting beaten to a pulp by INLA members in pubs.
The McGuinness/Adams autocracy- not quite master strategists after all…
Their activists are not lined up for long jail sentences as far as we know. That is an improvement.
Fair enough Aq- but that didn’t stop them losing 27,000 votes in Dublin during the last 3 years…
Does it really matter a damn whether Eoghan Harris has been totally consistent in his politics over the last half-century?
There has been enough underlying continuity in them for, at least, the past 35 years. He has been utterly and consistently opposed to the sectarian warfare waged over most of that time by Republican paramilitaries. The Irish public know that about Harris – and couldn’t care less about what he is alleged to have once thought about North Korea, or bank nationalisation, or whatever else.
He may have shifted allegiance in the past couple of decades from Fine Gael to Fianna Fail – but, given that those two parties have almost identical policies on every issue, that hardly represents a great deal of political volatility.
Some of his political predictions have been way off target – others have proved to be highly accurate and perceptive. At any rate,
he has never simply formed part of the media consensus – which is one of the reasons that so many journalists hate him.
His analysis of the present position of Sinn Fein seems to me to make a lot of sense.
In the North, Sinn Fein, as a political party, could be said to have done extremely well out of the conflict of the past 40 odd years. Whether the Catholic/Nationalist community as a whole has done as well is, of course, another question. The representatives of that community might well be in government in Northern Ireland by now in any case – without all those years of bloodshed and misery.
The main winner of the current settlement is clearly the Unionist community. It lost the last vestiges of its former political power in Northern Ireland more than 35 years ago – and now has got a fair share of it back again. In the process, the Unionists have also witnessed a conclusive end to almost 90 years of Republican paramilitarism – and the threat to the existence of the Northern State is effectively over.
They have also paid a price for this, but it is one they can live with – and, whatever way you look at it, Sinn Fein is now firmly inside the tent of Northern Ireland.
But, just as the Hunger Strikes were a watershed for the political advances of Sinn Fein in the North, so, I believe, the last election will prove to be a turning point in the party’s fortunes in the Republic. They fought the election in the best possible circumstances – and still managed to lose votes where it mattered. In this context, the personal exposure of Gerry Adams, the President of an supposedly all-Ireland party, as someone who lacked a basic familiarity with the political culture of the Republic, also revealed the key structural weakness of his party.
Harris is probably wrong to predict that Sinn Fein will lose all their remaining seats in the Dail in the next election – but that is not really the point. Almost 90% of the Southern electorate voted for Fianna Fail or Fine Gael this time out – the remaining votes were shared out between Sinn Fein, the Greens, the Progressive Democrats and sundry Independents.
In these circumstances, the very most that Sinn Fein can realistically hope for, in the decades that lie ahead, is to become sort some of parliamentary ginger group – with the outside possibility of holding one or two junior ministries in some future coalition government.
That role more or less suited the PDs for the past 20 years or so – as a party which was always only a few steps to the right of its partners in Government. But it is completely unsuitable for a party that sees itself as some sort of radical national liberation movement.
The likely future that Sinn Fein can expect in the decades ahead is scrapping it out for the last seat in half-a-dozen or so (mainly border) constituencies. In other words, the party will be forced to retreat back to its traditional bases of support.
One of the contributors to this discussion apparently believes that the spectacle of Sinn Fein ministers working well in the Northern Government – as I have no doubt they will do – is likely to swing voters behind Sinn Fein in the next Southern election. That is, with respect, a complete fantasy. As the recent uproar over the re-location of Aer Lingus services to Belfast has shown, voters in this State simply do not think in that way. The notion that large swathes of Fianna Fail voters would rather vote for Sinn Fein than Fine Gael also exposes a fundamental failure to grasp the changes that have taken place in the Republic over recent years. For all his apparent inconsistencies, Harris has showed himself to be much more in touch with those changes than have most of his critics.