Pointless

By AM Wednesday, April 3, 2013

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As suggested in a recent post there is a substantial disparity between Easter Sunday Republicanism and Good Friday nationalism. How a chasm of such magnitude might be bridged between two divergent and by now seemingly irreconcilable political projects appears logic defying. If these two can reconcile it will be taken as read that one of them was never serious about their current project to begin with.

As for trying to collapse those two days that separate Easter Sunday from Good Friday the former BBC security correspondent Barney Rowan has explored the possibility. If he is naive I take comfort from not sharing his company. If on the other hand he is brave, I regret that I have neither his stamina nor his patience.

On UTV a few nights back there was a Rowan feature about Sinn Fein’s professed desire to talk with republicans. Declan Kearney, the party chair, is the Sinn Fein figure most associated with the proposal. Ciaran Cunningham of the Republican Network for Unity, who represents one of the many groups on the republican spectrum, seemed up for the dialogue while stressing his team’s commitment to republican principles.

It should be axiomatic that there is little purpose to republicans sitting down with Sinn Fein when republicans are increasingly coming to refer to ‘Sinn Fein the Unionist Party’. Not so long ago Martin McGuinness stood with the British police to scream ‘traitors’ at republicans. Now they supposedly want to talk rather than scream.

Sinn Fein’s real interest is in grabbing the opportunity to wax peaceful and reasonable in the hope that it will look better than the two main unionist parties ever did in their relationship with the difficult wing that seemed intent on ‘flagging’ up trouble. It will try to rekindle from the embers something of the flame that once ignited political interest in capitals like London, Dublin and Washington, proclaiming itself the guardian of the peace process at a juncture when slippage and drift seem to be replacing courageous and imaginative as the lexiconic buzzwords.

At its upper echelons Sinn Fein must also be aware that its value to the British establishment lay almost solely in its ability to halt republican armed activities. To the extent that armed actions still go on, the party’s asset status is undermined. Sinn Fein feels the need for a facelift in the hope that it can once again look attractive to the increasingly disinterested benefactors it had long sponged concessions from and in doing so help offset its growing image as a tail for the DUP top dog.

Thinking about it seriously, what would Sinn Fein have to say to republicans that they are not already aware of? Republicans are not in a position of finding Sinn Fein an unknown quantity, about which they might discover something previously beyond their ken. There is too little in the way of common ground to be jointly fertilised. The things that divided them to begin with have only grown wider as time has moved on and Sinn Fein has become ‘the unionist party.’  Sinn Fein support the police who are kicking in republican doors, the prison service that is mistreating republican prisoners, the Diplock courts that are sending republicans down for long stretches, the executive that is pushing the Tory economic cuts, and the partition principle that legitimises the British presence, plus a whole lot more that republicans disdain the party for.

Declan Kearney knows all this, and not being a fool by any stretch of the imagination, must as surely discern that republicans will no more come to share his position than they will support the bombing of Gaza. 

For his part Ciaran Cunningham is one of those republicans who stuck his head above the parapet when it was both unpopular and dangerous to do so. He was on the ground facing the hostility of Provo power in the bitter atmosphere that mushroomed immediately after Shinner gunmen killed Joe O’Connor in Ballymurphy. He put it up to the Provo regime of truth and challenged its lies and defied its intimidation. 

For that reason I think that Ciaran Cunningham, before considering any sit down with Sinn Fein, should request a simple gesture of its honest intent. Ask it to acknowledge that the Provisional IRA killed Joe O’Connor. It does not have to give an apology or even an explanation about either the killing or the reason PIRA lied after the deed;  just a simple statement that the IRA on Friday  the 13th of October 2000 took the life of Joseph O’Connor.

If Sinn Fein fails to give the answer that Ciaran Cunningham knows to be true he should not even bother rising from his chair to begin dialogue just to hear the same old same old. And he can always tell detractors that he had no intention of sitting down with a body intent on lying from the get go.

 Besides, Joe O’Connor and his family deserve nothing less.