Brendan Hoban: Sorry is still the hardest word for Sinn Féin
Western People 27.2.2024
It would be gratuitous not to congratulate Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin (SF) and Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on their day in the sun. Especially O’Neill who made an almost royal descent down the famous staircase of Stormont in regulation high heels.
The occasion was steeped in history. The founding purpose of devolved government in the North was to secure ‘a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people’ and the border’s boundaries were drawn to secure Protestant and unionist control. And it did, since 1922.
But now, it might be argued, all has changed, changed utterly (or at least symbolically), as a nationalist representing a new majority is the titular head of the government of Northern Ireland. Changed? Well, maybe but, as we have learned to accept, in effect very little has changed at all.
While the former Irish rugby international, Andrew Trimble, wondered aloud in an RTÉ documentary why in terms of identity, the question of Protestant or Catholic in the North was so compelling while at the same time so irrelevant in the South, the new First Minister and her Deputy were making their way home after representing their respective tribes at the funeral of John Bruton under the protection of Police Service of Northern of Northern Ireland. Who could have predicted it?
It would, of course, be utterly naïve to imagine that anything has changed or that the ‘new dawn’ promised by O’Neill represents anything more significant that a PR gloss on an enduring SF antipathy towards the DUP and vice-versa.
Little more, possibly, than a divvying up of the spoils of office as periodic elections throw up yet another sequence in the ritual dance (since 2002) of collapsing/restoring the Northern Executive – with one stepping out and another stepping in again.
The presumption of a united Ireland, fuelled by Mary Lou McDonald suggesting it was now within ‘touching distance’, is part of the grand plan to unite Ireland (or to ensure that it remains disunited), by repeating the old slogans to keep the troops happy.
There’s no real effort to devise strategies that will unite the people or help to cross the great canyon of bitterness and recrimination that is the prevailing legacy of life in the North. And PR guff about ‘serving everyone equally’ and being ’a First Minister for all’ are no more than cliches to be taken out and dusted down periodically but not to be taken at face value.
Michelle O’Neill made that clear when, in an interview on the very day of her triumphal entry into Stormont as First Minister, she was asked if she would apologise on behalf of SF/IRA for the Provo campaign of violence, mayhem, death and destruction that had brought such suffering in its wake. She immediately lapsed into defence mode. No, she said, because it was justified in the circumstances. It was an instinctive reaction – as if she had been asked if she took sugar in her tea. The question was expected and the response automatic.
But Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald both know that the Provo campaign of violence was not justified in the circumstances. It’s the great lie that on repetition is presumed to be true.
It cannot be true that a 30 year-long campaign of indiscriminate murder can be justified on the basis of the discrimination and domination of Catholics/nationalists by Protestant/unionist privilege. As Martin Doyle writes in his recent book, Dirty Linen, The Troubles in My Home Place, ‘If discrimination and domination are bad, does it really have to be said that indiscriminate murder is so much worse?’
To accuse anyone of saying that indiscriminate murder can be justified on the basis of discrimination and domination is effectively to accuse them of lacking a moral centre. I have no doubt but that is not true of Michelle or Mary Lou but I leave it to them to navigate that territory for themselves. But what they can’t do is pretend that discrimination justifies murder – and history (and heroes like Martin Luther King) testify to that. Discrimination can never be a justification for murder.
In his poem, ‘A Response to Omagh’, John Montague wrote with justified exasperation: All I can do is curse, complain./ Who can endorse such violent men / As history creaks on its bloody hinge/ And the unspeakable is done again.
In Martin Doyle’s book, of the many families whose lives were ruined by the Provo campaign of violence, the name of Mary Casey stands out. Her father, Jack McCann, was killed in an explosion as he was driving a coal lorry, covering for another man who was going to a wedding. Mary was 21 at the time and she told Simon Carswell of the Irish Times that her father was identified by the braces of his trousers. There was no corpse. His wife, struggling with cancer, was sedated and couldn’t attend the funeral. She died in December 1973, with Mary losing both parents within fifteen months.
She told Carswell: ‘The one killer who got away, I would like to meet him. Nothing will ever come out of it, but I just want to look into his eyes and see what kind of life he had. I just want someone to say sorry. No one has ever come and said sorry.’
The day Doyle was writing about Mary O’Sullivan, an opinion poll published in the Belfast Telegraph found that 69 per cent of Northern nationalists and republicans agreed with Michelle O’Neill, then NI First Minister Designate, that ‘violent resistance to British rule during the Troubles’ was the only option.
‘Sorry’ can sometimes be the hardest word to say.
Brendan, thank you for attempting to extract the sliver of inhumanity lodged deep in Ireland’s heart by those ready to repeat the Adams lie: “It was justified in the circumstances.”
When Ireland has lost its Christian faith, its fading culture, and its prized identity, what will remain, as once the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone, will be the mechanically mouthed lie: “it was justified” and the bold attempt to be proud of decades of murder.
Are you both, Brendan and Joe, also expecting or calling for apologies from the British and from the northern state and its various agents for crimes committed on its behalf? It`s a bit too easy, isn`t it, from the safe distance of a university library or seminary to pronounce on the guilt of people who in real life faced brutal repression by the military and injustice institutionalised by a state. The legacy of trauma doesn`t lie only on one side in that conflict. In the Republic, smearing through the media was constantly used against republicans and northern nationalists during the troubles in the north, but in the new politcal era it just looks shabby and it doesn`t seem to cut much ice with today`s electorate.
Naturally it is easy to criticize the PIRA and its apologists from the comfort of a library — since the chances of receiving a death threat, a bullet in the mail, or an actual kneecapping or assassination are now slight.
Whataboutism or Whataboutery or Both-sides-ism is the comfort blanket of the guilty at all times. That the PIRA, whose victims were mostly their fellow Irishmen, Irish women, and Irish children, should present themselves as champions of Democracy is sickening, and that they, like neo-nazis, should thus ensure the perpetuation of an evil ideology makes me fear for Ireland.
As an Irishman I learned from America the sacredness of Democracy (listening spellbound to JFK during his Irish visit in 1963). When I hear the MAGA crowd rave when Trump repeats the most effective of his slogans, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, I hear the echo of that other wily demagogue: MACHEN WIR DEUTSCHLAND WIEDER GROSS. Of course the whole world is thinking this. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history/article/an-american-fuhrer-nazi-analogies-and-the-struggle-to-explain-donald-trump/25CBE639F23D2D80870EA4D3F1E6D566
“In summary, I would just like to say one thing, gentlemen: In the liberal countries, the mission of the press is understood as saying: press plus people against leadership. And for us it has to mean: leadership plus propaganda and press, etc. in front of the people! This is all leadership of the people. Each individual is a leading member of the people and has to feel responsible for it. Each individual must fundamentally understand these higher leadership insights. Whatever may be discussed among each other, in front of the people this leadership is a single bloc, a single closed unit…. Gentlemen, that is a very clear principle! If we fully implement this, then the German people will become great and powerful through this leadership. Then we are not now in 1938 at the end of a historical epoch, but we are certainly only at the beginning of a great historical epoch for our people. I now believe in this future of the German people, gentlemen. There may have been some people who once asked themselves the question: “The leader is a dreamer – why does he even believe in such possibilities?” Very simple, gentlemen. World history is made by people… The value of the German people is an incomparable one. I will never allow myself to be persuaded that any other people could be more valuable!” https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1958_2_6_treue.pdf
As Catholics, we try to apply the teaching of Christ to our daily lives, which is what I take it was intended by Brendan Hoban in the article above, but I just wonder if it was right to try to put the focus of blame for the horrible sufferings of the Troubles exclusively on one political party, to require apology from them alone, and appear not to remember the responsibilty of the other parties including those in the Republic, and the Stormont and British Governments, which was to order things in such a way that leads to justice for everyone. This has progressed, is still being worked on, if in the painfully slow way history has of resolving things, and the crass majoritarianism of the old Stormont is now gradually growing into something that is beginning to look like democracy.
Seamus Heaney, often quoted on this site, in his poem “Funeral Rites” writes of an imagined national funeral for all the victims of the Troubles, ceremonially to mark and to do expiation for it all, to put what we can of the past behind:
“Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:
the temperate footsteps
of a cortege, winding past
each blinded home.”
The horror of the word ”neighbourly”, the use of “blinded” to refer to both the lowered window blinds that mark a home where a wake for another victim is being held and the depth of pain in the bereaved, both hit home sharply.
In such a context, the use of the word “whataboutism” doesn’t do much useful work as suggests mere mechanical, unthinking insincerity, if not a pathetic attempt to find time until a better answer presents itself, but people struggling to find moral perspective in such a complex context have to take account of all the facts, including those of the undeniable brutality and injustice experienced by all victims, and then an acceptance that crimes were committed by all sides. Forgiveness of each other, required of us by Christ, is transcendent. Must it require abject apology for wrongs done before it can be granted, or could it be inherent in our living well in the present to realise a vision of justice to be brought to life in the future? Isn`t that the best kind of amendment?
From a review of Maria Cahill’s memoir: “It’s not just the evil Adams has done that makes him so unbearable to his critics. Martin McGuinness was just as bad a man, but he wasn’t self-righteous, unctuous, creepy, pompous and vain. Nor did he write atrociously sentimental fiction and mendacious windy autobiographies. Máiría, brought up in the Sinn Féin cult in what she hates being described as “republican royalty”, knew Adams as a family friend.
“Her trust in him and many of his colleagues was eroded by their callousness when they learned that from the age of 16, she had for more than a year been raped and disgustingly abused sexually by her aunt’s partner, Martin Morris. He was a member of the IRA’s “Civil Administration Unit”, a polite name for the “punishment squads” whose job was to torture and mutilate young people with iron bars, baseball bats and guns to bring them to heel. A gifted student, she dropped out.
“When the IRA learned what Morris had done to her, they waited until she was 18 and then terrified her over five months of interrogations, in which male heavies demanded from her the most intimate, humiliating details (“How many fingers did he use?”). Despite her pleas, they staged a confrontation. Three IRA members watched as Morris ranted and swore at her that she was “a fucking sick lying bastard”. They ruled he hadn’t been proven guilty and let him continue to roam the neighbourhood as a Sinn Féin commentator on police reform and community restorative justice.
“Máiría would have years of physical and mental illness. “It was similar to living in a cult,” she writes, “for one becomes so conditioned to living in a groupthink bubble that a person cannot see a life beyond it … I knew I needed to get out of it if I was to have any chance of survival. Now, the greatest danger to me was not the IRA or my abuser, but my own mind.”
“Then she took control, defied the republican leadership by going to the police. When they botched the investigation, she told her story in a TV documentary. Despite orchestrated and vicious social media abuse, she became a columnist and public figure. Notably, though, she had little support from the feminist establishment or the human rights industry.”
Joe, there is no doubt that there were psychopathic individuals involved in various ways on various sides during the troubles, but the interim report presented today in Belfast underlines the culpability of a number of parties to the conflict including the British Government, and called on them all to apologise both for their actions and inactions during that time. Apologies for the past have been given before now both by Sinn Féin leaders (speaking for a Provisional IRA professedly now defunct, no apology conceivably coming from them any longer) and by British Government ministers, Lord Cameron being one, for the actions of their agents, though no apology yet has fully satisfied victims` families. The hope must be that the publication of the full report will go further in bringing that about, when names are named and facts revealed.
But as regards the article by Brendan in which he places the focus of moral opprobium solely on Sinn Féin, I write as someone who is neither a member of Sinn Féin nor an apologist for them or for the Provisional IRA, merely someone who lived through the troubles in the north and who observed enough to know that crimes were committed by people on all sides. Sinn Féin was then and is now a political party, has become a hugely popular and important one in the Ireland of today because of its social/political policies, as the result of the last election in the Republic showed. Indeed, its success in that election caused a mountain to move, viz the bringing of the two big traditional parties into unprecedented coalition. If moralising is our theme, maybe we ought to remember the roots of both of those parties in earlier national conflict.
All this of course is without reference to the very concept of political apology itself, its validity and efficacy. The growing calls globally for apologies by “first world” countries for their roles in the slave trade and colonisation both religious and mercantile raise various questions: Of what value is a political apology if it is issued by someone not directly a party to an earlier, specific crime? And can it have any value if it is somehow distinct from a formal justice scheme? – being two that come to mind.
Much more important than political apology is a change of heart. It is not good enough that so many played footsie with IRA terrorism, obnubilated by the faux religious and faux nationalist rhetoric of Gerry Adams and many others; and that they continue to cuddle up to Sinn Féin’s project of having future generations of Irish kids believe that the IRA campaign was perfectly justified and indeed a glorious thing.
I`m all for the change of heart referred to, though it may take a miracle for that to happen, as miraculous as for example Isaiah`s vision of lions and lambs lying down together, though I believe that`s what political life can bring about, with time. And the change of heart should be in those from all sides involved in the violence in Ireland ( let us not forget the Dublin and Monaghan atrocities) during those years. I`m glad too to see a recognition of the limited meaningfulness of mere apologies.