Bury My Heart at Bended Knee

By AM Monday, September 16, 2013

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Guest writer Sean Bresnahan with a piece questioning the trajectory of Sinn Fein and its role within the Northern Executive.


With the Assembly only back from summer recess, not that anyone would notice and having done diddly-squat in months, we now have Messrs Robinson and McGuinness swanning off on overseas sojourns yet again, this time to New York - apparently on 'business', with the purpose of wooing the Big Apple if a recent News Letter report is to be believed.

Some might be forgiven for questioning just what exactly is the purpose of this Assembly and for wondering what 'business' does it actually conduct. For time after time reports have emerged in the mainstream media of the so-called Executive's inability to implement even its most basic proposals, never mind the much-vaunted 'shared future' that's spoken of ceaselessly by the political class in the six-counties and which American diplomat Richard Haas is supposedly coming to iron out. Thank God for Uncle Sam!

So what does the Assembly actually do then? The obvious retort would be "Sweet FA" given how these two so-called leaders don't feel the need to even be there. But when we scratch the surface there's much more to it than meets the untrained eye. For the purpose of this Assembly, as with the entire political system right down to the British-funded community sector jobs, is to provide a smokescreen, a pliant shield, to distract attention while the real business of running the British occupation of Ireland continues apace behind the scenes - absent of course the political opposition, often violent, that traditionally formed a feature of the northern statelet.

That this is the culmination of long-term British strategy in Ireland is there for all to see; as Anthony McIntyre, the host and patron of this site once declared, the goal was to 'include republicans while excluding republicanism.' Given how things have panned out in recent times it would surely be very difficult, nigh on impossible, and only the most ardent of Sinn Fein's brainwashed cadre's would attempt to dispute the accuracy of this assessment. He is bang on the money and has been well and truly vindicated, having called this well over a decade ago.

Sinn Fein may well sit as the largest nationalist party in their Northern Ireland Assembly but only a fool would fail to realise that this position came at a price - for many, with rising numbers from within what was once the party's traditional base now beginning to join the chorus of disapproval - a price that was much too high. For in order to reach the hallowed turf that is the Office of the First and Deputy-First Minister the party was forced to jettison its entire political philosophy, having replaced it with a version of republicanism more akin to that of Fianna Fail. Without question it is this that accounts for the transfer of those like Mary Lou McDonald, and more recently Chris Andrews, to the party stable in the south rather than it being a case of the conversion of such notables to the project of Irish republicanism.

We have seen the same thing in the six-counties with the likes of the affable millionaire-businessman Mairtin O'Muilleoir, as well as a plethora of local Councillors and activists whose politics are more in the mold of what once was represented by the SDLP, emerging to give the party that middle-class credibility it needs to sustain it's electoral strategy. For electoralism is all they have left. Everything is now about the party; the republican movement is no more - at least in terms of Sinn Fein's role within it. And they know it.

Sinn Fein have accepted the legitimacy of the British constitutional claim, the once-decried Unionist Veto, the institutions of the Northern Ireland state in their entirety, including the PSNI and the role of British Military Intelligence in its operations. They've accepted political policing, their own members being brought up on historical charges, internment by remand, secret evidence and closed material proceedings, the continued use of Diplock Courts. Perhaps most alarmingly, given that their meteoric rise within the northern political system that resulted from the republican protests inside Long Kesh which ended in the deaths of ten IRA and INLA prisoners in the bitter year of 1981, they have accepted the rampant abuse of political prisoners by the sectarian regimes that operate in Maghaberry and Hydebank Prisons. That's only skirting over the detail of their about-face but already the price that's been paid for high office stands exposed in all its shocking glory.

Given all this it's little wonder that here in the heartlands of Tyrone the republican base and the republican people are regrouping and beginning to gravitate towards alternatives to the failed project and strategy of what many now refer to as "New Sinn Fein". This process is seemingly being rolled out not only in the north, where the Provisional Movement was at its strongest towards the latter end of the armed struggle, but right across the country. Only recently I had the pleasure to attend a commemoration in Glasnevin Cemetery organised by the local Sean Heuston 1916 Society where, alongside the traditional and oft-heard (though always welcome) voices of Tommy McKearney and Tony McIntyre, we had a powerful oration from Tom Stokes, a man who's mesmerising, gravelly, North Dublin tones captured the essence of what republicanism is all about and symbolised to me the progress already being made by a resurgent Irish republicanism once again capable of reaching out all across the thirty-two.

Any honest assessment of recent developments in the fabric of republicanism surely demonstrates that the sands are shifting. It's fair to say that New Sinn Fein no longer represents the Republican Movement or republicanism as traditionally understood - certainly not 'round these parts anyway, which was borne out on Easter Monday in the republican stronghold of Carrickmore by the presence of thousands of simple folk marching behind the banner of Tyrone National Graves; the very organisation Sinn Fein cynically attempted to eliminate in the best traditions of republicans converted to working a British solution.

The fact the party had to rely on bringing in bus-loads of people from outside the county for the much-publicised 'Tyrone Volunteers' Day' - something that had never happened ever in the past bar the 2009 National Hungerstrike Commemoration held in Galbally, itself, as all around here are aware, a part of the cynical attempt to ruin Tyrone National Graves - is also indicative of where the republican base now stands. Further afield we only need look at the thousands of men and women, supposedly "masquerading" as republicans, who took to the streets of Belfast last month to highlight the ongoing injustices tolerated by those who sit in silence in the chambers of Stormont.

It's not unreasonable to suggest that the people have passed judgement.

For the offensive and arrogant British presence in our country is very much still reality and those who bought into the idea of "playing the game" are beginning to realise they've been left holding the losing hand in a stacked deck - Theresa Villiers' recent attempts to preempt the Haas process, as decried in this month's An Phoblacht, is but yet another illustration of this. The British set the rules.

That the likes of Villiers would attempt to preempt anything does not surprise me in the slightest given historical precedent - she's a Brit serving the Brit interest in Ireland. Yet amazingly Gerry Adams and his party can't seem to get their heads around this basic concept. The cries of a 'shocking and inexcusable ignorance of Britain's role in Ireland' by Strabane Sinn Fein Councillor Karina Breslin in response to Villiers' speech at the British-Irish Association meeting last weekend in Cambridge, while no doubt genuine given its source, inescapably fails to take account of reality and how Britain has been treating its last colony over the past few years, not to mention the arrant disdain it now shows for any notion that the Sinn Fein leadership, and indeed its membership, might ever do anything other than what they're told.

Because they are fully aware of how utterly the party is woven into the very fabric of British rule here, something Francie Molloy conceded long, long ago in what must seem like another time, when statements such as 'we are really going to administer British rule for the foreseeable future, the very principle of partition has been accepted' were somehow held to be clever or acceptable. To republicans looking back on this now such statements are nothing short of nauseous. To republicans looking in they are wondering what in God's name is going on.

Sadly those who remain in Stormont despite the internment, the harassment, the political policing, the reneging on agreements - the "shocking and inexcusable ignorance" - are serving the same British interest as Theresa Villiers. Whether they realise it or not, whether they do so consciously or not. Given the undeniable structural correlation between the British produced 1995 Framework Documents (rejected by the republican movement) and the institutions set up under the 1998 Agreement then clearly Good Friday represents the British position in terms of Britain's predisposed constitutional preferences and its desired political arrangements for Ireland.

Therefore I say all this represents the British interest, give or take a few long overdue reforms, themselves subject to the procrastination and renegotiation of the Unionists - who also have seemingly little fear of wakening some sort of slumbering beast that may yet lie dormant somewhere within the depths of the Sinn Fein movement. Their reneging on the supposedly secret Maze-Girdwood deal certainly demonstrates that. It also tells us that New Sinn Fein will now stand for anything in order to continue propping up the very British Assembly it once so ardently opposed, perhaps not least because they are literally mortgaged to the hilt in relation to this system, both politically and personally, having become and having attracted career politicians for whom Irish republicanism and the Irish republican struggle is now their source of income.

Despite best efforts (and I can concede that for many, such as Ms. Breslin and indeed our own Michael 'michaelhenry' McIvor, best efforts have been made) absolutely nothing has changed beyond who is administering the British occupation of our country and sadly that now includes New Sinn Fein. The most salient point that party and its adherents steadfastly refuse to embrace is the sorry fact that what once was a proud and fiercely independent republican movement has accepted and embraced the integrity of the very rule of law, the very British law, it once stood rigidly and indeed righteously against. It's for this reason, more than the countless others we can point to, that Sinn Fein can no longer credibly be held to represent Irish republicanism as traditionally understood and practiced - though yes of course, like many other political parties before it whom it now mirrors, it emerged from the Republican Movement.

It's a good job for all concerned that the soul of republicanism now resides elsewhere, among the likes of Stokes and McKearney and McIntyre and the countless thousands determined to build a vibrant and credible alternative to the status quo of the machine that still keeps us down. It is a republicanism that is picking itself up, dusting itself down and moving forward again with renewed confidence, a republicanism once more beginning to come into its own. At that same commemoration in Glasnevin our kindly host Mackers referred to a poem read at the funeral of Tommy 'Toddler' Tolan, a poem in who's words lies the key to what we must be about - for patience is now the key. "Bide your time... Bide your time".

There's an inner thing in every man,
Do you know this thing my friend?
It has withstood the blows of a thousand years
And will do so to the end...