Time in this weird season goes by in a blur but the offence remains. Sinn Féin cannot undo last Tuesday.
Their first thran responses, the smugness of Michelle O’Neill with her ‘what, me? I was only burying my friend’ are what stick in the mind. Plus that perfectly distanced white-shirted procession - stretching into the distance and flanked by crowded footpaths.
What everyone could see was effectively denied by O’Neill, insisting that everything had been done properly. It was denial up there with the Trump insistence that his inauguration was bigger than Obama’s.
‘I brought in the regulations so I believe in the regulations.’ Not, though, for a senior IRA man’s funeral march. A swift and whole-hearted ‘we were wrong’ would have taken the ground from under the feet of southern haters and northern political enemies. It might even have softened the hurt for families who settled for tiny, bare funerals. Will this hurt Sinn Féin north of the border electorally? Maybe not. The sheer nerve of their exceptionalism goes into the memory banks all the same. The rules are not for them.
Brass neck but thin skin. Even this long after the war, even constructively, you’re still not allowed to criticise from within.
That over-sized crowd surprised people who have gone a long way along the SF road into open disapproval, which brought them instant hostile and personalised reaction. But whoever looked to the Shinners for grace under pressure?
Lack of cop-on was the worst of it for sure. They managed to offend people already badly hurt. They made it look, yet again, as though Sinn Féin is indeed run by an old-style IRA. And they trashed Bobby Storey’s own lasting achievement, which vies with O’Neill trashing her own deputy first minister recommendations of self-denial for the common good.
Storey may have done all manner of things as the IRA’s intelligence chief. In the end the most significant thing he did was to back the peace, but today’s top team and their ill-tempered tweeters managed to obscure what their enemies delightedly blanked from his record. O’Neill and her handlers let the concept of a peace-making IRA and Storey the peace processor go hang.
What he should be remembered for in modern republicanism – surely? - is his loyalty to the Adams-McGuinness leadership and their last, lasting project.
Who wants to be immortalised, by implication, for the ability to instil terror into smaller people? He would surely rather be remembered as at Adams’s shoulder rather than as ‘Big Bobby.’
Yet Mary Lou McDonald brazened it out before hitting stateswoman mode. The Republic’s regulations have been taken at least as seriously across the population as here, without the background fuzz of clashes between executive ministers. A fair few potential voters across the border, if they noticed, would have turned up their noses at the highly-organised procession that stretched so far beyond the recommended maximum attendance. (But it was behind McDonald, O’Neill, the retired Adams, so out of mind, eh?)
Beyond SF party loyalists, who hear only hostility from the media, ‘the south’ wouldn’t have liked those jokey graveyard selfies and cheery chats. That’s if many did indeed notice. The virtual plastic screen along the border that long predates the virus dims both sights and sounds. The low priority accorded ‘the north’ in the new Dublin government’s agreed programme means SF need not worry over much about northern blowback.
The next northern elections are far enough away for whataboutery to blur what happened. Arlene Foster says O’Neill hasn’t said she was wrong and sorry isn’t enough. Right. The old Troubles boomerang rule says the more themmuns criticise the sooner us’ns rally round our own.
Families sickened at the sight of hundreds saying goodbye to a non-family member, when their own losses had to go without ceremony, will not forget. And northern Sinn Féin, McDonald a mere bystander, is still stuck halfway out of uniform.
