What Brexit will mean here, and for Ireland as a whole, is up in the air.
All we know is that the Good Friday Agreement has been cited again and again as setting parameters for what Brexit must do; it must observe the border as it is now, and not tinker with it. Yet the Dáil in one of its bursts of anti-Sinn Féin rhetoric, last week, reinforced by media voices, regressed to pre Good Friday days. How else to describe it?
An ‘inner circle’ had hauled Mary Lou McDonald back on message, it was said, within 24 hours of her sensible words about not wanting a border poll to happen during the chaos that would accompany a hard or no deal Brexit. The sober ‘inner circle’ in an Irish Times editorial had nothing on Mary Lou’s rivals in the public square. ‘Serious questions about who’s in charge’ said Micheál Martin, audibly holding himself back. ‘An indication that the hard men are not far away’, said justice minister Charlie Flanagan with, predictably, more relish. Most exercised of all was Brendan Howlin, leader of a Labour party bounced out of third place in the Dáil by the hard men’s front men, so to speak, led now by a woman who until this had out-performed almost every man-jack of them.
‘Puppet-masters still in charge’ said Brendan, who did concede that Mary Lou was ‘trying to take a step forward’ but had ‘to toe the line’ and ‘look over her shoulder’. Because, all together now, ‘none of us doubt that it is behind-the-scenes forces that still hold sway.’
The IRA, Gerry Adams still there behind the curtain with Bobby Storey and others; the scornful Dáil voices meant this only half-evolved, slightly constitutional party is still not fit to share their government. The same people think Sinn Féin should power-share in Stormont, into which Mary Lou should re-direct Michelle O’Neill as of yesterday.
Hold on a minute. The Good Friday Agreement was built on bringing the IRA in from the cold, which it did. The puppet-masters did a good job. Does even the most exercised defender of the Republic’s democracy imagine Sinn Féin’s collective leadership are plotting anything other than political advancement?
All the same, McDonald made herself look weak, not her own woman. Was it a rush of blood to the head in the first place? An argument still mid-way through the collective process that she thought concluded? Her record suggests no rushes of blood.
‘She started so well,’ one student of republicanism in the Republic says, ‘after they shouted good riddance at Gerry, then it turns out there’s another formidable Sinn Féin leader.’ So any ‘revelation that Adams and the IRA hadn’t gone away, you know, not at all’ would be greatly welcomed.
McDonald’s first serious goof, her swift public turnaround revelation enough, made SF’s many and varied critics happy. But southern politics ought to fret over its own slow thought processes. Indeed it was inconvenient, all round, that Good Friday led to SF knocking the SDLP out of nationalist leadership. Though some SDLP negotiators saw it coming in the sense of entitlement in the republican leadership, and in the behaviour of the two governments. Older northerners of a nationalist stripe knew there was always a big, underground republican vote waiting for it to be a realistic thing to do, and as it turned out, waiting for the IRA to go away. The logical follow-on was for republicans to share power with unionists.
No such logic followed in the south; fine to ask unionists to share power with republicans, but not southerners.
Mary Lou’s other remark, that she would be happy in a new Ireland to stand for a new anthem under a new flag, vanished in the kerfuffle. (As for meeting the Orange Order, the Order disposed of that offer.) If indeed she was yanked back into line for the sake of cantankerous ‘Nordies’ impatient to vote away the border, did the back room also reckon it was too soon to talk about ditching the Soldier’s Song and the Green, White and Gold?
Sinn Féin’s president rowed back on one notion while the other evaporated. A better performer on a bad day than many at their best, on Sunday McDonald said the time for a referendum is ‘drawing near’. This was a formal speech, none of that thinking out loud in front of a microphone. Gerry beamed beside her in retirement mode, not a bother on him, and Mary Lou smiled like a trouper.
