Who’s ashamed of the IRA?
The campaign for the European and local elections is upon us. The roadsides are now festooned with the softly smiling faces of many a hopeful, wistful, or downright deluded politician. Even along the most remote boreens the scary grins of our would-be-leaders lie in wait. Clearly, modern politics has a snazzy tie, as its pivotal moment of definition.
The other morning I heard on RTÉ one of the most blatantly one-sided electoral interviews there could possibly be. Michael McDowell, the Minister for Justice — and yes, I admit that every time I read or write that it makes me laugh — was interviewed along with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin.
Now the interview was conducted along a strange format in that first McDowell spoke and then Adams spoke and neither overlapped with each other.
Michael McDowell was allowed to speak virtually uninterrupted for the whole of his spot. He spoke not of the local elections, not of his own party’s policies or the policies of his government, not of the strange fact that although he is a senior minister in government he is a member of a party that can not even muster enough electoral support to stand in the European elections.
He was not asked to defend his record while in government. He was not asked about the massive security expenditure for the recent European enlargement and the talking up of trouble, which did not materialise, by himself and others. He was asked none of that.
He was not even asked about the extremely controversial citizenship referendum being held at the same time as the elections and about the disputed claims he has made regarding it.
In fact, he was not asked anything. He was merely allowed to talk at length about Sinn Féin, the IRA, violence, criminality, republican hypocrisy and the threat they offer to Irish society.
On occasions the interviewer would feed him lines such as: “Do you believe Gerry Adams’s claims that he has never been a member of the IRA?”— and on he would bluster.
Now if Gerry Adams was never a member of the IRA then I’m a lifelong member of the Conservative and Unionist Party. I don’t know why he peddles that line. But what the media here fail to recognise is that every time they try to kick a storm up about that, it is an issue about which nobody cares.
There are a number of probing and disturbing questions to be asked of the Provisional movement but Gerry Adams membership of it is not one. The dogs in the street know he was and the dogs in the street are slightly bemused when he denies it, but see no further interest in it than that.
So Michael McDowell pushed on in his tough guy role, and I’m sure a psychologist could have a field day with these middle-aged office men in suits who appear to have a pathological need to cut it up rough or like George Bush pretend to be JohnWayne, whilst a nation listened.
After he had eventually finished the interviewer turned to Gerry Adams. As soon as Gerry Adams began to speak she interrupted him. She continued to interrupt him throughout the interview despite his own protestations that Michael McDowell had just been allowed to speak unimpeded. It was bias at its most blatant.
She repeatedly pushed him about republican criminality and his own status within the IRA. She had not once asked Michael McDowell to explain the high-level culture of corruption that tribunals have proven to have existed or the invasive security measures that are stepping-up for the visit of George Bush.
She asked the government minister nothing at all, but asked Gerry Adams every old question he has been asked a thousand times. And this was presumably the approach agreed by the national broadcaster at editorial level. It did not say much for journalistic independence — and, as far as the electorate was concerned, was a disservice.
It unfortunately is not an isolated incident and mirrors instead a trend amongst so-called serious political commentators whereby republicanism remains the dirty word of Irish politics.
I read a book recently about Tom Barry, one of the senior IRA leaders in the area where I live around the time of the Black and Tans. It is the kind of local history that my grandmother first put me on to and reflects the background of rebellion and republicanism in which she was steeped. It was on those stories of the old IRA, the fight for Irish independence, the rebel songs and ballads that I was reared.
My family came out of a Co. Cork that had been very active in the fight against the British authorities. I have read widely in all of that since. I have read books that have sought to offer some kind of balance away from that of the glorious exploits of the IRA as told in song and story.
I wanted to get that kind of balance. I wanted to realise that the stirring stories of my childhood were in reality guns and dead bodies and all the sordid reality of human conflict.
I then came back again to a belief that — even with the picture fully coloured in — this was an amazing period in Irish history, when the sons of farmers had taken on the forcers of the British Empire and driven them out of Ireland.
I came to believe again that great uncles I’d had in the IRA were just ordinary men, farm labourers, who’d taken up arms against overwhelming force. I again saw that there was something heroic in that. I came to think again of my grandmother’s story of being an eight-year-old girl lined up against a wall by British soldiers.
And I came again to the realisation that so many of Ireland’s elite are ashamed of Irish republicanism in any form at all.
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