Those photographs of a beaming candidate plus beaming sponsors made a short-lived story the week before last. There will be more where that came from.
Brexiteering has insulted Irish national identity, on show again yesterday in the shape of that letter to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar from 1,000 ‘civic nationalists’. Insulting identity can be a slow-burn. Brexit has the EU27 strained, Ireland as well as the UK in a spin.
That Fianna Fáil pop-up in West Tyrone tried trading on local roots plus national connections. Sorcha McAnespy, briefly or allegedly the candidate for next year’s council election, says her difficulties with Sinn Féin involve ‘nepotism and misogyny’ in the party plus their industrial wage policy. McAnespy has staying power. Just as resilient is the theme of internal party strife, and not only in West Tyrone.
Every political organisation in the world breeds it. The most closed, disciplined and secretive cannot wipe out personal feuding, very often about who is seen to be on the way up and oftener still who has been overlooked. ‘Gods make their own importance.’ Studies of the French Revolution Terror and Stalin’s purges show grudges, some petty to an outsider, feeding into mass blood-letting.
Closer to home and in our own time, experiences common to the IRA and INLA, UDA and UVF will never be completely told. Now that we are post-post-conflict some old paramilitaries may be more forthcoming, though if you have killed and destroyed for a ‘cause’ admitting any tinge of personal motivation can hardly come easily. Many might be slow to admit to great-grand-children just how un-political and non-ideological the basis sometimes was for murderousness.
At least for political parties the blood-letting is only verbal. In the worst moments, it clearly takes lumps out of minds and hearts all the same. Behind those broad grins around candidate/non-candidate McAnespy lies a weight of Sinn Féin disgruntlement, temporarily upstaged by Fianna Fáil entitlement and bad blood, most of it arguably radiating from the gent to the right in those photographs of McAnespy. Or so a considerable number of FFers might contend. Beyond his faithful constituency and FF traditionalists Éamon Ó Cuív is not universally loved.
Specs, face and height are less reminiscent these days of the grandfather, Éamon de Valera, his illustrious forebear. Dev was a man of his time, not universally loved either; even with a sparkier personality this was always going to be a testing inheritance. But here is Ó Cuív, 32 county FFer, bringing comfort to various dissidents. And indeed, although dealing with the shivering, shrunken SDLP was always bound to be a problem, it may be that Micheál Martin is making heavy weather of it. So Ó Cuív and the young Mark Daly see or saw a chance to point up their leader’s fabled indecisiveness?
In a more charitable interpretation, perhaps the two FFers saw an opportunity to get in on the ground-floor of creating a vehicle more republican than the SDLP, more conservative than both Sinn Féin and the Martin-led FF on what used to be called ‘faith and morals’. Martin’s late and eloquent pitch to ‘Repeal the 8th’ left Dev’s grandson cold, predictably enough. This is the man who told the Dáil, two days before the referendum, that treating abortion as infanticide under the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act could be a way around statutory 14 year prison sentences.
But here crying out for intervention, or at least a walk through of a script, was West Tyrone, steeped in internal party ructions from before it was formally designated West Tyrone for electoral purposes. ‘The SDLP leadership has moved to defuse a potential row in West Tyrone over the choice of a successor to retiring MLA Joe Byrne.’ (December 2015.) That potential SDLP row was emphatically not defused. ‘But fall-outs in West Tyrone are not confined to the SDLP. Sinn Féin, once renowned for its discipline, has seen one of its most promising female figures walk away from the party.’ (April 2016.) The promising female, of course, is McAnespy. The stories quoted, both from this paper, are only from feuding in this generation.
Unionist contenders also enjoy the odd spat. But West Tyrone having a nationalist majority is for nationalists to win so nationalists contend for the privilege. Barry McElduff is now reflecting on his re-emergence.
For the forseeable future, local government has to soak up ambition and competitiveness Stormont absorbed that Westminster cannot excite. New improved civic nationalism demands a bigger stage, though plainly determined to keep faith with Ballyrush and Gortin.
