By Malachi O’Doherty

When the SDLP and Sinn Fein represent the unification of Ireland as a
core fundamental aim, are they really speaking for the most urgent
desire of the people who vote for them, or is this hankering for Irish unity in the hearts of nationalist people not more like an aspiration they would really prefer to indefinitely put off?

Certainly, if a referendum was held tomorrow and there seemed the remotest prospect of it being carried, it would be a rare eejit who
would vote for it, for higher taxes, medical cards and Fianna Fail perpetually in government; though Fianna Fail would ever afterwards be on the lookout for a Northern coalition partner to keep them in power.

I suspect that the yearning for a united Ireland is best enjoyed as an unfulfilled romantic notion, the way Irish America indulges it, without ever having to worry about living in it.

Like a lot of people in Northern Ireland, I have a great love for Donegal. From I was a child, I have been aware of a strange sense of
relaxation felt on crossing the border. It was the freer air, I supposed.

Behind you, in the black North, were B specials and rain spattered gable murals of William of Orange; in front of you, the fragrance of the burning turf and your first glass of beer in a seaside hotel overlooking a sun dappled bay.

And there was a little more to that sense of freedom; we believed that the Garda Siochana were a lax lot who would allow the the pubs to stay open all night long.

Just a few years ago, I was in a bar in Rosnowlagh on Good Friday, when drink could not be served, by law. We made our own arrangement with the waiter of course. As the night wore on the crowd behind a curtain grew larger and more animated. I asked the waiter to explain to me how all those people were able to get a drink.

“A sure, they are the ones from the Passion play up at the Friary”, he said. “We make an exception for them.”

That’s what I like about Donegal, a very flexible reading of the rules. It adds charm to a place you want to visit; it’s not what you want at home.

I think people imagine that if we one day have a united Ireland - and I doubt very much we will - you will be able to feel the fresh breeze off the hills of Donegal balmily lifting our spirits in the backstreets and housing estates of West Belfast.

In fact, a rainy day on the Falls will still just be a rainy day on the Falls. Our councillors will still be dull, unimaginative local people, most of them men who can rarely find their way from one end of a spoken sentence to another.

Already, the fantasy that we can be a one island jurisdiction clutters our politics and our civic life. Many local arts projects which have just learnt that their money has been brutally slashed by the Arts Council—or the Airts Cooncil o Norlain Airland, as it is happy to be called.

Those groups that have been cut are waiting to see which groups south of the border have benefited at their expense.

This is the height of petty crossbordery, that publishers down there can dip into our resources, and we can dip into theirs and all of us can spend twice as much time filling in enormous forms, to placate twice as many bureaucrats.

That’s what you get imagining that we are one when we are not.

You don’t have to be a sullen Unionist to see the nonsense of that. And you don’t have to be a nationalist to love the heft and roar of the Atlantic swell and to wish the odd time that it was on your doorstep.

The trouble is, it’s not.

The abject failure of government policy since the creation of the state has meant the number of Irish speakers collapsed from about 250,000 to 20,000. According to a report two years ago, the number of Irish-speaking families with children at school in counties Mayo, Cork, Waterford and Meath was just 53. Throughout the entire Gaeltacht regions there were just 2,143 families with school children who were using Irish at home.

This, then, is what more than 80 years of independence, 80 years of forced learning and faux regard for the ludicrously titled “first official language” has delivered. What is most astonishing, though, is that even now our politicians do not want to recognise the policy for the disaster that it is, and so we continue to clutter up the school curriculum with an approach to Irish that is a waste of time and money.

Daithi’s been running a billingual discussion on this since Sunday.

At a time when the IRA’s reputation has sunk to a new low following the murder of the Belfast man Robert McCartney, Morrison’s play reminds us that the “struggle” was always as much about retaining internal cohesion as it was about fighting external foes. Transporting us to Belfast of 1984, he centres the action on a bunch of Provos who, far from being united by the uncompromising tactics of the Thatcher government, are riven by paranoia thanks to the security services’ determination to lean on suspects and get them to turn “supergrass”.

Still the party is in a healthier financial position than any of its rivals. The report quotes an earlier report by the Sunday Business Post:

It [Sinn Fein] produces three sets of accounts: one covering all of Ireland’s thirty-two counties, another for the twenty-six counties of the Republic and the third for the six counties of Northern Ireland. The Republic’s Standards in Public Office Commission — to which all parties must make an annual financial declaration — is authorised to examine only the 26-counties report and in any case has never conducted an audit of any political party, saying that it accepts the accounts at face value. But the Sunday Business Post said that it had discovered anomalies between the three sets of accounts, for instance a declaration of “admin expenses” was three times more in one than in another. There were also widely different figures for donations between all three accounts.

It then switches attention to Des Mackin, Sinn Fein’s millionnaire finance director, who explained the party’s low comparatively level of expenses: “We’re a party with a core of voluntarism. We don’t have to pay anyone to put up posters. We don’t have to pay people to do anything.”

The Irish Times report consists mostly of quotes from Dermot Ahern so I’ll add those paragraphs in here -

“Those advancing it are in fact impeding the drive towards unity by distracting attention from the immediate priorities of getting the institutions of the [ Belfast] Agreement back to full working order, including the concomitant North/South dimension and the justice, equality and policing reforms,” he said.

“I want to stress that we already have the template [ for Irish unity] - it’s called the Good Friday agreement. That agreement is backed by a popular 32-county vote. Its mandate is bigger than any one party. Only those who are working to implement the agreement have credibility on unity,” Mr Ahern added.

He said that as a “republican my main personal and political goal is the unity of Ireland” but that it could not be achieved by violence. “For Fianna Fáil, the democratic political goal of a united Ireland is at the heart of our republican perspective. Our project did not end in 1923.

“Our project held, and still holds that unity by armed force would - at best - transfer nationalist isolation and alienation on to unionists. At worst it would threaten the lives of tens of thousands of fellow Irish men and women. We believe Connolly was right when he said that ‘Ireland without her people means nothing to me’.” He said the agreement represented the clear will of the Irish people, and “no republican can impede that will”.

“Our bottom line is this - unity down the barrel of a gun, unity through intimidation, aggression, murder, cannot work. Anyone clinging to those means is impeding the path to unity. Any such group or party cannot claim to be republican,” he added.

Unity could not be achieved unless nationalist Ireland started focusing on the future and not the past. He said Irish republicanism has always been “of its time” and “whatever about the past - in today’s democratic world violence for political purposes is simply unacceptable”.

“While the alienation and isolation of the past should never be forgotten, rather than be immobilised by a divisive past we need to focus on a shared future. We must stop describing the present with reference to the conflict and the simple dichotomies of the past - Catholic versus Protestant, Irish versus English.”

He further asks why the sudden outcry against the McCartney killing when so many others have flown under the international radar?

Since the ceasefires, by donning a veil of democracy Sinn Féin distracted the democratic world from the reality of Provisional criminality and the smell of sulphur. These days some of those who feted the Sinn Féin leadership and wet nursed them into the mainstream political process are having restless nights; though some through personal vanity still don’t see the magnitude of their actions.

The only consolation of being duped by the Provisional movement into believing they were buying into democracy is that they also duped many of their own followers – even if that reality has not dawned on some of them yet. For the majority of the nationalist community there never was any romantic notion about murder and the representatives of mainstream nationalism were unambiguous in condemning any notion that murder could be somehow justified.

According to Angelique Christafis:

The handwritten letter which claimed to be from the IRA and Sinn Féin, told the sisters: “You will all die in time,” adding they were on a hit list and would not be shot but knifed. Enclosed with the letter was a photograph of the sisters, which had been smeared with excrement.

Adams had told a US audience on March 14:

Well, the garda may be finding lots of money, and fair play to them. But there’s no connection back between that money thus far-thus far. Now we could wake up tomorrow morning and there could be the evidence. But thus far there is none.

‘Thus far’... looks like that forensic evidence is there now though.

But if this subtle hint by Adams indicated prior knowledge of events, it makes you wonder where he got his information from.

Just under £7 million was spent last year by the Government last year on relocating people under threat. Twelve months earlier, at the height of an alleged IRA spy scandal that caused the Stormont power-sharing administration to collapse, the bill stood at a staggering £43.7m as security force personnel demanded moves. Applications for the Special Purchase of Evacuated Dwellings (SPED) scheme fell from a high of 689 in 2002/03 when the espionage plot was uncovered, to around 120 in the last financial year.

By Alex Kane

I have never really approved of the St. Patrick’s Day junkets to Washington and the White House; because I have never fully understood the need to fatten the egos of a group of Ulster politicians, who, between them, represent less than two per cent of the UK electorate. Most of them are pompous enough already, without giving them the chance to place a few more photographs on their mantelpieces. The fact that President Bush decided to ban all of the parties, because he didn’t have the courage to exclude Sinn Fein alone, sums up the orchestrated humbug which lies at the heart of this annual hoopla.

The absence of the unionists, the very low-key presence of the SDLP, and the media frenzy surrounding the McCartney family, has highlighted the PR dilemma now facing Sinn Fein. As Gerry Adams makes his way around the country, shunned by the big political players and playing to depleted audiences, he must be wondering if the past ten years have been worth it. Partition is consolidated. There is no likelihood of a United Ireland. The IRA is defeated. Unionism has modernised and gained new ground. Adams, himself, has moved from being the man who brought terrorists to the negotiating table, to being the man who is now regarded as the public face of a criminal empire——less Ourselves Alone and much more Al Capone.

But if Sinn Fein confirms, or even increases its mandate at the next election, it will interpret it as a vindication of both Adams and P. O’Neill. It is essential, therefore, that the election results represent a victory for the democratic parties; and that means that those parties are going to have to agree a game plan.

The primary purpose of any pact must be to win back seats presently held by Sinn Fein; and to lessen its chances of making gains in those seats it has been targeting since 2001. In other words, I am advocating a UUP/DUP pact, alongside a Joint Unionist/SDLP pact, operating for Westminster and local council elections. The democratic parties should be looking at what happens after May 5, rather than simply concentrating on their own successes.

At present Sinn Fein hold West Belfast, Mid Ulster, West Tyrone and Fermanagh/South Tyrone and have hopes of winning Foyle, Newry/Armagh and South Down. If unionists don’t field candidates in Foyle, Newry/Armagh, Mid Ulster and South Down (none of which they can realistically win, anyway) the SDLP can win all four. In return, the SDLP and DUP should stand down in West Tyrone (leaving it a likely win for the UUP).

Fermanagh/South Tyrone is a little more problematic, although I would suggest that the SDLP and DUP stand down in favour of the UUP. And, as far as North Belfast and South Belfast are concerned, I think it would be sensible for the UUP to give Nigel Dodds a free run, in return for Michael McGimpsey getting the same in South Belfast.

If these three parties can agree (and yes, the Alliance and other smaller parties must consider their own role) it is possible that Sinn Fein can be reduced to just one seat, leaving the DUP with 7/8, the UUP with 5/6 and the SDLP with four. More important, though, such a result represents a victory and a clear mandate for the democratic parties. It opens the way to a voluntary Assembly coalition embracing DUP/SDLP/UUP/Alliance and certainly makes it a good deal easier for the British and Irish governments to create the machinery to facilitate that coalition.

I appreciate that all three parties will have difficulties with these proposals, but, if carried through at the general and local government elections, I believe that the potential political gains will far outweigh any immediate electoral disadvantages in terms of individual party tallies. The real obstacle to a lasting settlement is Sinn Fein and these proposals represent a means of shifting that obstacle.

Sinn Fein will be apoplectic, but there is very little it can do. The door can be left open for it to take up Executive positions once the IRA’s status and arsenals have been finally and unambiguously dealt with. In politics, it is democracy itself, which is the real middle ground.  Messrs Adams and P. O’Neill have had a veto for far too long and it really is time that both governments and the democratic majority called their bluff.

First published in the Newsletter on Saturday 19th March 2005

Americans applauded their stand against the I.R.A., whose stature at home and abroad has plummeted in the face of the McCartneys’ campaign to have Robert’s killers arrested. By breaking the code of silence in Northern Ireland that has long surrounded crimes committed by I.R.A. members, the family has galvanized public opinion against the I.R.A., which for the past 35 years has claimed to be defending the Catholics of Northern Ireland from Protestant gunmen.

Congressman Peter King, a longtime Sinn Fein supporter who met with the McCartneys: “They have a forum that no one has ever had before. [If] this case is followed all the way, and the guys who did it go to jail for it, that will have monumental impact on the people of Northern Ireland.”