Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Sinn Féin’s united Ireland focuses on geography, not people

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O'Neill
Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O'Neill Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O'Neill

Sinn Féin’s claim that the IRA’s 30-year military campaign was “inevitable” suggests that either the party is not serious about a united Ireland, or if it is, that it has no idea how to get there.

An odd idea, you say, particularly in view of the party’s popularity north and south. However, there is ample evidence that Sinn Féin’s concept of unity is flawed and that support for its united Ireland campaign requires an unhealthy helping of amnesia.

Sinn Féin’s united Ireland focuses on geography, not people. A united Ireland is not about removing a geographical border, but about ending sectarian division. The republican solution lies in Wolfe Tone’s unity of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.

However, as constitutional nationalists, SF has merely sought to represent Catholics, leaving Protestants and Dissenters to the DUP. That mistake has deepened sectarian divisions and put Irish unity on the long finger.

Sinn Féin suggests that no Irish person ever woke up one morning and thought that conflict was a good idea. Well, actually some of them did. Why does SF think the Provisional IRA was formed?

Dissatisfied with the IRA leadership’s refusal in 1969 to engage in a northern campaign, some older republicans (mainly in Belfast) broke away to launch a military struggle for Brits Out.

They opposed the civil rights movement’s attempts to reform the state. Instead they intended to destroy it. Today Sinn Féin administers that state on behalf of the British government.

So was it inevitable, in some form of paramilitary predestination, that men, women and children should be killed by IRA bombs on Bloody Friday, at Claudy, La Mon, Enniskillen and Birmingham? Of course not.

Those and similar actions lowered the Provisional IRA to the level of loyalist death squads and the British army at Ballymurphy. While the army’s victims did not obtain justice, they at least achieved recognition of injustice.

Claiming that the IRA’s violence was inevitable, denies its victims even that basic recognition. Belfast City Council’s recent commemoration of Bloody Friday did not use the words “Bloody Friday” or refer to the IRA. Will historical denial unite the Irish people?

SF advocates peaceful means to achieve Irish unity, but defends the IRA’s 30 years of violence, arguing that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) allowed them to enter politics.

The IRA campaign was based on the claim that Britain had no right in Ireland. In the GFA, the IRA changed its mind and accepted that right. That’s what allowed them to enter politics.

They surrendered their arms as a prelude to administering what they used to call British rule in Ireland. They did nothing new. Michael Collins and de Valera did the same.

Today Sinn Féin are living in a parallel universe. There never was more unity between Protestants and Catholics on the need to tackle the cost of living crisis, but there is no one to develop that unity.

A republican approach would lead a mass movement of Protestants and Catholics against the injustice of poverty and hunger, reflecting the non-sectarian Outdoor Relief movement of the 1930s. (It was destroyed by the Unionist Party and the Catholic Church, both fearing the rise of godless communism).

Instead Sinn Féin are seeking submissions on a united Ireland. They are apparently oblivious to the growing unity of ordinary people wanting an end to child hunger and poverty and the need for thousands to rely on food banks.

Ireland’s richest party is not taking submissions on those topics.

Their solution to the cost of living crisis is to copy that most famous Catholic nationalist, Daniel O’Connell, who asked the British government for money to feed the Irish during the Famine. (He was pretty popular too.)

In view of the difficult conditions which many workers and families currently face, perhaps Sinn Féin will now realise that the inevitability about the IRA’s campaign was that it would inevitably become sectarian and its ensuing politics would ensure that the ordinary people on both sides would inevitably experience the worst excesses of godless capitalism.