One of the outstanding features of the past fortnight’s political pile-up is how taken-aback the southern political and media establishment have been. What Ireland do they live in? No, hold on, we know the answer to that. It may as well be a different country.
To be fair, up to almost the last moment a number of us, including me, saw Sinn Féin as determined not to do what in the person of Martin McGuinness they did last Monday. Only the wilfully unseeing though, which by the look of it included most of unionism, had failed to register the growing anger - among nationalists of all types - at the behaviour of the DUP as fronted up by Arlene Foster.
The south’s political class apparently saw nothing at all. In recent days southern media outlets have come blinking into the light, scrambling to catch up, effectively saying ‘Hang on, Arlene’s a menace, Martin has done his best.’ The scramble pointed up a lack of accurate, sustained coverage over years, twinned with lack of political interest and focus. One fed the other.
Global media cutbacks have had their effect, and this story died some time ago. Like British ones, southern media have closed offices, slashed coverage by cutting staff. The few left in place or sent up at short notice know how little their newsdesks usually want from the north. And what it is they want, how the story should go: Sinn Féin bad, unionists good.
When engaged at all the southern establishment is keen to find the good in unionism, resolutely anti-republican. You might say that’s predictable, even fair enough, for the sins of the Troubles. But the sins of the present also figure, chiefly republicanism’s now substantial southern presence. A Fine Gael-led government still struggling with the aftermath of major recession chafes at the populist pull of Gerry Adams and Mary-Lou McDonald and for a media establishment at one with its government on modern republicanism, the moral is clear. If you support northern Sinn Féin by word or image you help them in the south as well. A central contradiction escapes far too many.
Armed republicanism is responsible for the majority of the Troubles deaths and injuries. What the IRA did - under McGuinness or a command he sat on for many years – and what Sinn Féin acted as apologist for over decades was kill, maim and destroy, which sticks in many throats. No Troubles killing should be forgotten. But perpetually judging today’s Sinn Féin by the IRA’s record contradicts a basic premise of Dublin’s northern policy. Or what its policy was.
Today’s SF northern front rank, advisers and staffers still includes people with serious IRA pasts. The process Stormont fronts was launched on the basis that it would, progressively, absorb those people and others like them into politics; as per the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, substantially Dublin-negotiated. But the SDLP were dominant then in nationalism, SF’s southern rise still in the future. Encouraging republican politicisation then was easier.
The GFA envisaged a permanent southern government role as witness, guarantor. Successive governments have neglected that role. Many on both sides of the sea hoped they could stop thinking about Northern Ireland. British lack of interest – though the DUP’s Westminster votes are a Tory consideration - has been matched by, possibly encouraged by, southern hostility to the main northern nationalist party.
After almost two decades, the south has yet to accept that the chief voice of northern nationalism, that is of Irish people in the north, is Sinn Féin.
A hands-off/remember republican guilt attitude has not helped unionist development. A year ago there were hopes of Foster; not traditional DUP, comfortable election performance, next scheduled election years off. But the long red, white and blue scarf last week was Union Jack Arlene, portraying Britishness in the most confrontational way possible.
Sinn Féin wanted the institutions to survive, but it has no army at its back. Foster’s DUP put those facts together, and reprised old majority-rule arrogance in tandem with brazening out RHI. Peter Robinson’s torn-up Maze scheme was a shocker, the flag protest another. Why not walk earlier? Sinn Féin liked office, and excavated expenses on industrial scale. Plus if they had walked any earlier Dublin would have called them wreckers. The nuclear option was the only one they had.
The south heard little from their media of this year’s build-up. McGuinness’s qualities are sayable now that it is probably too late. He needed support, and government effort, much earlier.
