Mick Clifford: MacSwiney’s legacy is being stolen by Sinn Féin

Next Sunday, Terence MacSwiney’s grave is set to be robbed in the name of rewriting history. The graverobbing will be metaphoric but is worthy of comment. MacSwiney was the Lord mayor of Cork when he died on October 25, 1920, in Brixton prison after 74 days on hunger strike during the War of Independence. Two other volunteers in Cork at the time, Michael Fitzgerald and Joe Murphy, also died.

MacSwiney’s image features prominently in a Hunger Strike Commemoration event to take place on August 27 in Cork. There will be a march through the city followed by an address from Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill. This is, to all intents and purposes, a Sinn Féin gig. One might well ask what Sinn Féin, which, in its current iteration was formed in 1970, has got to do with MacSwiney, who died fifty years earlier.

The answer lies in an ongoing attempt by today’s Sinn Féin to rewrite history, particularly through the recent decade of commemorations. From the centenary anniversary of 1916 up until today, the party has held separate events and marches at various points, often in competition with national or official commemorations. This is designed largely to emphasise the party’s belief that there is a direct connection between the killing that its former armed wing, the Provisional IRA, engaged in for over 25 years, and the national struggle dating from the revolutionary decade.

In 2016, the party held a separate display in Dublin city centre to commemorate the Rising. The most commented upon feature at that display was the volume of re-enacted gunfire as if this was the main thing to be remembered about that momentous event. There was more of the same in the recent Civil War commemorations. On the anniversary of the first executions of anti-treaty volunteers last November, a group of Sinn Féin supporters stood at dawn outside Mountjoy prison. 

Last March, on the 100th anniversary of Ballyseedy, outside Tralee, where eight anti-treaty volunteers were blown up by pro-treaty forces, Sinn Féin wanted to have their leader speak at the official event. When told it was to be non-political, they held their own separate event, at which Mary Lou McDonald gave her address. As with all of this stuff engaged in by the party, the past is cast in a way that best suits the imperatives of the present.

There is a pattern in the individuals the party has fastened onto in the recent commemorations. They all died before the peaceful acceptance of the free state in 1923. The vast majority of their surviving comrades worked to make the new state function and sought change through the parameters of an imperfect democracy. Clinging to the legacies of those who died in the heat of the preceding battle allows Sinn Féin to speculate that they were the kind of die-hards who wouldn’t have accepted the free state and would have approved of the campaign of killing in the late twentieth century.

In this hypothesis, Pearse and Connolly would have approved of the Provos, even if their comrades in 1916, Eamon DeValera and WT Cosgrave, who both narrowly escaped execution, quite obviously wouldn’t. MacSwiney, we are asked to believe, would have stomached the Provos record of killing more civilians and more Catholics than any other organisation during the northern conflict.

Equally, the Shinners’ mythology has it, the young victims of Ballyseedy would have understood the Provos habitually blowing up civilians, despite the sole survivor from that massacre, Stephen Fuller, being totally opposed to it in real life. And on it goes, the dead in battle serving a purpose that to the greatest extent was abhorrent to their comrades who survived. Now they have come for MacSwiney, to drag a make-believe legacy around the streets of the city he served.

The 1981 hunger strikes have a major resonance with the self-styled Republican moment because it sparked the beginning of Sinn Féin’s political ascendancy. Bobby Sands is the iconic figure from the event, having been elected an MP on his deathbed and being the first to die. At the forthcoming Cork event, Sinn Féin is seeking to link MacSwiney’s self-sacrifice with that of Sands, connecting the respective conflicts in which the two men were involved. Both certainly shared supreme courage and a selfless disposition, but beyond that they were drawn from different worlds and lived at different times in incomparable circumstances.

Ironically, if one were to apply the Sinn Féin logic in appropriating the politics of dead men from the 1920s to Sands in the 1980s, it could be posited that he would have had nothing to do with the party in its current position. Sands died while fighting for the violent imposition of a united Ireland. Sinn Féin compromised, as it had to, on that unobtainable vision. The Brits, as so-called Republicans would have it, are still here. Who says Sands would have gone along with the compromises of the Good Friday Agreement? His sister, Bernadette, who was prominent in the anti-agreement 32 county movement, and married to late Real IRA leader Mickey McKevitt, is one example of those who didn’t. How can Sinn Féin claim that Terence MacSwiney would never have accepted a compromise with the Brits but Bobby Sands would have?

At least Sands was drawn from the ranks of the Provos. MacSwiney, by contrast, was part of a national movement at the fag end of the Imperial age, fighting for a form of self-determination at a time when violence was the primary means of resolving international disputes. It undoubtedly had overwhelming popular support as expressed in the general election of 1918. That is a different planet from the Provos’ decades-long campaign to kill anybody whose death might advance the hopeless cause of a united Ireland.

MacSwiney doesn’t deserve to have his legacy tainted by association with the latter-day IRA. He doesn’t deserve to have the movement he was part of linked to one which engaged over decades in organised crime, the imposition of summary justice, the relocation of favoured paedophiles, the post-conflict bank robberies and grudge murders, the massing of unaccounted millions. Who can claim that MacSwiney would have had, over such a long period, contempt for the wishes of the people at large?

No doubt, in this time of social media’s parallel universe, and Sinn Féin’s expertise in exploiting it, the rewriting of history will be accepted by the younger generation in particular. Not much can be done about that except to highlight the fraud with facts. There has been a call for people to come out onto the streets for the commemoration event in Cork, to, by implication, show support for this bogus version of history. Pity they wouldn’t just leave MacSwiney’s legacy alone, not attempt to use him as a tool to retrospectively justify the Provos’ killing. Pity they wouldn’t just own their party’s dark past and concentrate on what can be done to improve the future.