Mick Clifford: Where do Sinn Féin’s loyalties lie?
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The past entered the general election campaign this week. In an interview, podcaster Joe Brolly asked Mary Lou McDonald about what he termed the “continued demonisation” of Sinn Féin, suggesting that party members were forced to defend the actions of the IRA. Brolly did not point to any specific example of this “demonisation”.
McDonald agreed she had been subjected to unfair inquisition from “the establishment” media and politicians.
“You don’t ask somebody who was a baby in the 1970s about something that happened in the 1970s,” she said. “That’s not a reasonable proposition.”
She also claimed that Sinn Féin is held to higher standards of accountability in the Republic.
The Sinn Féin leader is correct to dismiss spurious attempts — if they exist — to politically link her to the Provisional IRA. That was the past. She wants to live in the present.
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Is Sinn Féin held to a higher standard of accountability with regard to its past? Fianna Fáil is rightly reminded of how it abandoned public housing in the early 2000s and crashed the economy in 2008. Fine Gael, absolutely correctly, is constantly told that the party ignored housing from 2011, thus creating the current social crisis. Labour is only now beginning to get over the charge that it abandoned its roots when in government a decade ago. The Greens have been accused of selling their soul when they went into government. These are political charges, usually grounded in evidence.
Is it demonising to ask in the same vein why all kinds of strange goings on have surrounded Sinn Féin during the last few decades, right up to today? Surely it is legitimate to ask of the party, as it is of other parties, what its past record says about how it might govern.
After the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the so-called Republican movement pledged to pursue its aims exclusively through Sinn Féin. The movement, as it is termed, was to be subsumed into the party and fully commit to democracy.
We have never been told when the party ceased receiving funding from the Provos, as it had done in the days of the Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other. We do know that in 2001 Republican elements were responsible for a heist in Belfast docks estimated to be worth over £4m.
That same year, during a general election in the South, a number of arrests were made in Kerry of Republican activists suspected of vigilante violence, designed to garner votes. No charges followed.
We do know that in 2004 Provo elements were responsible for the Northern Bank robbery, estimated to be worth £26m.
When the Celtic Tiger was in full swing, Fianna Fáil’s Galway tent overflowing, grudge murders like that of Robert McCartney were being committed in Belfast by people associated with the movement. There is no evidence that these individuals were senior figures in Sinn Féin but every likelihood they were members or affiliated. Nobody was ever expelled from the party for anything to do with the McCartney murder.
In 2007, as Fianna Fáil was attempting Canute-like to hold back the enveloping mess it had created, Paul Quinn was beaten to death in Co Monaghan. He is understood to have annoyed a local IRA man. At no point did Sinn Féin investigate or move to expel anybody who could possibly have been associated with such savagery.
Four years later, Fine Gael and Labour entered government to follow the IMF’s dictat. The same year in Dublin Jonathan Dowdall was interviewed by three people, at least one of whom didn’t hold office in the party, as a prospective Sinn Féin local election candidate. The subject of whether he had “shot up” his uncle’s house was discussed.
In 2017, as the Fine Gael-created housing crisis was getting worse, a garda investigating the murder of garda Adrian Donohoe wanted to talk to a potential witness. The man in question said he wasn’t sure he could do so as he was a Sinn Féin member. The garda contacted the local party councillor who told him he didn’t have the power to do anything. The garda then went to the local TD, Gerry Adams.
The following year, 82-year-old William Hampton, a Welshman who had a history of mental illness and lived in a caravan, left an estimated €4.6m to Sinn Féin. He had no record of political activism but had visited this country on a number of occasions. Mary Lou McDonald described him as “a rebel with a cause”.
Around the same time a female park ranger in Arizona left €386,000 to the party. Sinn Féin’s American operation knew nothing about her but she had visited Ireland a number of times. No other party on the island has ever benefited from such a level of bequeathed generosity, not to mind from foreigners.
Last year, a quarter of a century after The Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Féin dealt strangely with an incident of a senator sending inappropriate texts to a minor. Niall Ó Donnghaile was expelled, but quietly. The reason for his expulsion wasn’t revealed and when he resigned from the Seanad, McDonald praised him. By coincidence, both of Ó Donnghaile’s parents had spent time in prison back in the days of killing for a united Ireland. To that extent he was from what might be described as Republican royalty. It is impossible to envisage any other party handling such an issue in that manner. Just as it is impossible to imagine any of the strange goings on around Sinn Féin over the last 25 years befalling any other entity.
There’s plenty of other highly unusual stuff about the party that pops up now and again but we could be here all day.
Forget about straw men from the 1970s, possibly constructed to deflect. The only real issue about Sinn Féin today is whether it is a fully subscribed member of a democratic process stretching back a century. Is the party’s primary loyalty to the State, as is surely the case for all other parties, or to itself and the aim for which it was formed in 1970, the unification of the island?
These issues matter. Sinn Féin has some highly competent reps, some well thought out and imaginative policies, a realistic aspiration to govern. But it also has a record of strange things happening which inevitably gives rise to questions around credibility, priorities, and loyalties. At least accepting that to be the case might go some way towards allaying concerns about it potentially entering government.