Much of this is directly relevant to Sinn Féin’s current attitude to the IRA’s past violence — which seems, in its carefully calibrated mixture of dogged justification and fuzzy regret, very similar to Billy Hutchinson’s attitude to UVF killing.
Earlier this year, Mary Lou McDonald said of the IRA campaign, “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign,” going on to describe it as “utterly inevitable”. As the years have gone by, and its electoral base in the Republic of Ireland has grown, Sinn Féin’s retrospective justification for past IRA activity has changed emphasis. Where once it was broadly accepted — including by Sinn Féin — that the IRA waged its armed campaign in order to bring about a United Ireland by force, the party now prefers to depict the brutal campaign as an unavoidable historical necessity in the fight for basic civil rights and freedoms for Catholics in Northern Ireland. This canny, if bogus, alteration serves two purposes: it is infinitely more palatable to a modern audience, and it also permits the party to slide past the uncomfortable fact that after a long and bloody conflict a united Ireland has not yet been achieved.
Kennedy’s book debunks that interpretation, although it does not gloss over Protestant sectarian bigotry and violence, disastrous early mistakes of the British Army, or the shortcomings of the Unionist-controlled Stormont government from 1922 to 1972. But he argues that significant changes were already well underway by the late 1960s, including “electoral reform, changes to policing, and reform of housing”. In a survey of popular opinion in the spring and summer of 1968, 65% of Catholics thought that relations between Catholics and Protestants were better than five years earlier.
The clear policy goal of the nascent Provisional IRA was a united Ireland won by force, he says, just as the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht vowed in February 1970: “We will erect the Irish Republic again in all its glory no matter what it costs.” The author’s contention is that the Provisional IRA’s long-term motivation was very far indeed from a civil rights agenda, not least when one considers the high numbers of Catholics that it killed and maimed in Northern Ireland. Indeed, he considers PIRA to have been the primary engine of the Troubles.
His view is supported elsewhere by a source somewhat closer to the republican heartland — Kevin Hannaway, a republican dissident who also happens to be Gerry Adams’ cousin, who remarked not long ago of contemporary Sinn Féin, “If they were out for an Irish Republic they failed. If they were out for civil rights they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”
In recent years, however, Sinn Féin has been extremely vocal on the case of Pat Finucane, a Northern Ireland criminal defence lawyer who was murdered by loyalist UDA gunmen in 1989 as he ate Sunday dinner with his family. Ken Barrett, a UDA member, was later convicted of his murder. An independent 2012 review of the case found evidence of collusion between Finucane’s killers and elements in the Royal Ulster Constabulary — for which David Cameron subsequently apologised — but “no over-arching state conspiracy”. Last week, the Secretary of State Brandon Lewis ruled out the full public inquiry demanded by the Finucane family – although he kept the door open for one in the future. This decision met with widespread outrage, including from the Taoiseach Michéal Martin and Amnesty International.
It is justifiable and understandable that Pat Finucane’s family should seek information on his appalling murder. Historic state collusion with paramilitaries in Northern Ireland should be held to account where it exists. What is not justifiable is Sinn Féin’s own refusal either to express any genuine regret or disclose information on the murders of lawyers and judges by the IRA, of which there were very many: among them Edgar Graham, a young Unionist law lecturer gunned down outside Queen’s University; William Doyle, a Catholic judge shot dead as he left Sunday Mass; Rory Conaghan, a Catholic judge murdered in front of his young daughter; and Martin McBirney, a left-leaning magistrate, civil rights campaigner and literary figure who was shot dead in his family home at breakfast.
Sinn Féin is no longer a movement outside the state: it has long been part of the government in Northern Ireland, and it is actively seeking to become the government in the Republic. For how long can it argue its own right to repress and deny “legacy” information on the murder of citizens in Northern Ireland?
It is hard now, perhaps, to convey the impact of what families bereaved by paramilitary murders went through at the time of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. They had to accept that the killers of their loved ones would gain early release under its terms; in one instance, the parents of Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, the last soldier killed in the Troubles, had to witness their son’s killer, Bernard McGinn, laughing as he was sentenced to 490 years in prison for offences that also included making the Docklands Bomb, knowing he would be free in 16 months. Many of them accepted this because they believed it would bring an end to the sectarian killing that had destroyed their own families — and to a large extent it did.
Very few, however, had fully anticipated the degree to which former paramilitaries and their vocal supporters would come to dominate the political narrative in post-Agreement Ireland, whether in terms of media coverage or electoral success. The emotional comfort of former paramilitaries has been broadly indulged and preserved at the expense of those their organisations have bereaved.
Many of the bereaved have now taken refuge in privacy and silence. Some speak out from within victims’ groups or are active online, bringing their stories of loss to a wider audience. On platforms such as Twitter, I have seen a measure of the online abuse endured by courageous campaigners such as Ann Travers, whose 22-year-old sister Mary, a primary school teacher, was shot dead by the IRA during a 1984 attempt to murder her father, the judge Thomas Travers, as the family walked home from Mass. The icy statement from the Sinn Féin spokesman Danny Morrison at the time was that “Miss Travers’ death was regrettable but understandable as her father was a member of the British judiciary.” The party does not seem to have shifted fundamentally in its thinking since.
That chilling “regrettable but understandable” over a young woman’s murder back in 1984 sits very close to Mary Lou McDonald’s “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign” in 2020. Or, indeed, Billy Hutchinson’s remark, “I justify everything that I did in the Troubles”. Yet any credible way forward for Ireland, North and South, must surely involve a genuine manifestation of respect for all those who lost their lives.
And if Britain is to re-examine the points where intelligence-gathering operations veered into criminal collusion, as it should, then the Republic of Ireland might also reflect on the degree of popular sympathy for the IRA in that jurisdiction, and the extent to which that funded and fuelled the murderous conflict in the North – a theme examined in a new book, A Broad Church by Gearóid Ó Faoleán.
Acknowledging and owning uncomfortable truths in history is a complicated and painful path for all parties, and so it should be. The best historians recognise this, I think, but the electorate now seems increasingly disinclined to do so. Much of Northern Ireland remains sharply divided among sectarian lines. Both there, and certainly in the Republic of Ireland, there is a resurgent, simplistic and deeply polarising IRA triumphalism, which many among the younger generation — who never lived through the raw misery of the Troubles — are finding quite an intoxicating brew. It must feel a bit exciting to them, I suppose. It doesn’t bode well.
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