Young politicians in Sinn Fein no different from the past

Just to be clear. This is what the Sinn Féin cllr said was 'misinterpreted'. pic.twitter.com/mdA74xqr1L

— Úna-Minh (is my first name) Caomhánach (@unakavanagh) January 16, 2020

Sinn Fein councillor Paddy Holohan said on the No Shame Podcast:

"It bugs me to death to understand that he leads this country and that he's so separated not even from society now but he's so separated from the history of this country. Leo Varadkar’s blood obviously runs to India so his great grandfather is not part of the history of this country ... Now Leo, obviously he’s an Irish citizen, but his passion doesn’t go back to the times when our passion goes back to. So we’re in a situation where we have a leader that’s not only separated from the history of the country but separated from the classes in the country now."

Dean Van Nguyen, an Irish-Vietnamese writer, responded:

"Putting value in antique blood links is a cornerstone of racism."

Two ways to view the republican movement...

And in contrast a News Letter editorial wrote:

"The Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald said yesterday that the UK and Irish governments must “intervene” if the Northern Ireland talks to restore Stormont fail. 

“The current stalemate cannot continue, the current position is simply not sustainable,” she said. 

Sinn Fein abstained from the vote on the Good Friday Agreement

David Trimble said to Alex Kane:

"Sinn Fein were heavily opposed to a Northern Ireland Assembly. In December 1997 it was proving almost impossible to get them to even agree to put an Assembly on the agenda. The SDLP wanted it on the agenda but they weren’t prepared to face down Sinn Fein at that stage."

Sinn Fein is "the Irish for John Bull"

Cartoon by Morten Morland (2003), via the British Cartoon Archive

Presently in Northern Ireland Sinn Fein has worked to make itself synonymous with progress and positive. They have done this to the detriment of Unionism and the wider protestant culture, both of which are perceived as cold and narrow minded.

European report labels Ireland a tax haven, Sinn Fein votes it down

Valerie Flynn wrote in the Times, 'Sinn Fein MEPs help Ireland avoid tax haven label':

"The adopted report criticises Ireland’s role in tax evasion. In it the European parliament notes with “regret” that the latest EU tax haven blacklist focuses only on non-EU jurisdictions and omits “countries within the EU that have played a systematic role in promoting and enabling harmful tax practices”. 

The parliament noted that “at least four member states would be included on the [blacklist] if screened according to the same EU criteria”. Although not named, Ireland was one of the four member states in question. The report was adopted by a large majority of MEPs."

Irish nationalism's xenophobia against long settled Protestants

Sinn Fein MLA Phil Flanagan tweeted:

"Unionists didn't have a problem with immigration when their ancestors descended on Ireland to grab land from the native population..."

While, republicans don't have a problem with immigration, so long as it's not protestant immigration to Ireland of centuries past. As Eoin O'Malley of Dublin City University wrote in the paper 'Populist Nationalists: Sinn Fein and redefining the 'radical right'':

"Nationalism in Ireland cannot sit easily with anti-immigrant bigotry (as long as the immigrants are not long settled Protestants."

Ireland's “Big, Mad Children” politicians

Roy Foster wrote in ‘Luck and the Irish - A Brief History of Change’:

"After one debate between suspicious DUP representatives and unbending northern nationalists the current BIA chairman (a businessman with links in North and South) expostulated, ‘It’s like dealing with children. Big, Mad Children.’ In this he probably reflected opinions that the mandarins in London and Dublin held in private, and that brought them closer together."

Would Unionism allow a Sinn Fein First Minister?

Cartoon by Ian Knox

Alex Kane said on BBC Hearts and Minds:

"And what happens when unionism is in trouble? It harks back to the mantra of united we stand, divided we allow McGuinness to become First Minister. 

So up pops Nigel Dodds to insist that unity is the answer to unionist prayers, then up springs David McNarry to say that unity must embrace the TUV, Orange Order, Conservatives and anyone who has a red, white or blue shirt in their wardrobe. 

The reality, of course, is that unionist unity won’t work, because unionist unity is merely a euphemism for a sectarian headcount: and sectarian headcounts will, sooner rather than later, kill off devolution. 

What unionism needs to do is promote a coherent and attractive argument in favour of the Union: an argument that presents the Union as valuable in its own right rather than as merely the next-best-option to Irish unity."

True Irish republicanism is anti-imperialist and anti-EU

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh speaking into a microphone

Ed Moloney wrote:

"The peace process was… A massive ideological compromise by Provisional leaders which would, inevitably, lead to IRA decommissioning and the transformation of Sinn Fein into a constitutional Nationalist party, not terribly different from the SDLP."

The Good Old Provisional IRA

In 1991, on the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916, Gerry Adams pointed to the Proclamation in the Sinn Fein Press centre, and declared to journalist Suzanne Breen: 

"Would any of the men who signed that document have signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement? Would Tom Clarke have extradited Dessie Ellis?

No way would those people be involved in talks about talks, rolling devolution, Atkins’ round-table conferences and the whole litany of Sunningdale-Darlington."

Sinn Fein revisionism, Ctd

Eamonn McCann said in an interview with Eamonn Mallie on Irish TV:

"The reforms which emerged allegedly from the armed struggle were in place in the early 1970s."

Syriza imposed austerity shows that Sinn Fein would impose austerity

Above is a letter to Portuguese Finance Minister Mário Centeno co-signed by European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis and EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici, asking for explanations as to why the Portuguese government is planning to cut structural deficit by only 0.2% of GDP in 2016 – which, the Commission notes, is “well below” the recommended target of 0.6% of GDP. More below. 

The IRA proclaimed itself "the lawful and legal" government of Ireland,why does it reject the standards and responsibilities of a moderngovernment?

The IRA Green Book was in existence while the IRA, (1956 edition), and the PIRA, (1977 edition) waged their armed stuggle. The Green Book said:

"Commitment to the Republican Movement is the firm belief that its struggle both military and political is morally justified, that war is morally justified and that the Army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann Parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory, air space, mineral resources, means of production, distribution and exchange and all of its people regardless of creed or loyalty."

Unionism won, Ctd

The IRA murder decades were a catastrophic, monumental, spectacular failure. The IRA's only triumph was to further polarise Protestant-Catholic and Planter-Gael relations, and to further poison the ability of protestants to self-identity as Irish (see research here). It ripped apart the Planter and the Gael and left Northerners with the demented notion that unionists are not and cannot be Irish.

Before 1916 and partition unionists were Irishmen. Before the IRA campaign many unionists saw themselves as Irish, now many few do. Sinn Fein reps have been known to speak to Americans, called themselves Irish unionists as British.

Martin McGuinness - From unbending hardliner, to the humanised andacceptable face of republicanism

Northern Ireland politicians from the early 1990s, by Gerald Scarfe for the New Yorker

In present Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness is viewed as the more moderate and conciliatory politician compared with the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. Yet a quick down historical accounts and observations show that the reality is the inverse. As is often the case in Northern Ireland, perception is incongruent to fact. Northern Ireland poet Nick Laird wrote:

"Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972."

1916 Revisionism

NBC presenter Brian Williams

E.L. Doctorow said "History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew." Napoleon said "History is a set of lies agreed upon." Jane Austen wrote in her novel Mansfield Park

"The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!"

T.K. Whitaker - A United Ireland would pose a "formidable" if not "intolerable" burden (1968)

Jack Lynch and Terence O'Neill, with T.K. Whitaker in the rear-ground, Ireland's rough equivalent to Sir Kenneth Bloomfield

Stormont is like a giant ATM, a quango spending a budget. Ireland has unshackled itself from the worst of Troika rule but stills faces severe fiscal headwinds and uncomfortable belt-tightening. Northern Ireland is an overgrown man child dependent on parental handouts. Southern Ireland is a recently graduated student trying to find a job and a stable footing in the world. Neither is in a position to make matrimony. Not at the moment and not without substantial reforms and rehabilitative measures from Northern Ireland and a more rebalanced economic structure in the south.

David Remnick - Gerry Adams has no right to the comparison with Mandela (1994)

Gerry Adams, by Martin Rowson

David Remnick visited troubled and torn Belfast in the early 1990s. He wrote about his experience and interpretation in the New Yorker, published in April 1994. You can read Remnick's account of his meeting with Gerry Adams in his Sinn Fein office in early 1990s Belfast here. It was an incredibly broad and detailed account of life in Belfast and Northern Ireland at the time. A note on how Belfast was very serene outside of the hotspots, how loyalist and republican paramilitaries are simply base gangs like in any other city; he painted a picture from his trip to Paisley's church, Martyr's Memorial; told us about Gerry Adams's hallowed republican forbears; and retold us about his ramble in the greens of outer Belfast with Michael Longley. One of the aspects of the long essay that most hit me was when David Remnick said that Adams no right to the comparison with Mandela or Arafat:

Dublin in Easter 1916 through the eyes of a Trinity Student

Dorothy Stopford Price, a Church of Ireland Protestant born in Dublin who lived through and recorded Easter 1916

Dorothy Stopford Price was was born in Dublin, on September 9th 1890. She was in Dublin for Easter 1916. Writing from the Under-Secretary’s Lodge in Phoenix Park in Dublin, home of Sir Matthew Nathan (a key figure in the British administration of Ireland), the 26 year old recorded her view of a city in revolt.

Is the Irish tricolour a "symbol of compromise"?

Robert Lynd, republican writer born in Belfast. by David Low

Robert Lynd, a former pupil of RBAI, wrote in June 1936 in the New Statesman, ‘In Defence of Pink’:

"Possibly, my love of a blending, a moderation, of colours is due to the fact that I grew up in a country in which the political colours were, in Mr. Chesterton’s phrase, “rich and glowing.” In the Ireland of my youth, orange was not permitted to be blended with green, and green was not perceptively diluted with orange."