FF and SF

There’s a telling piece in the IT recently on foot of Micheál Martin’s address at Arbour Hill to commemorate 1916. In it he launched an attack on Sinn Féin and in no uncertain terms:

[He] firmly ruled out a coalition with the party after the next election.
“I have made this repeatedly clear,’’ he added.
He said the failure of Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin to dissociate themselves from the Provisional IRA was unacceptable.
And:

He said they had had shown there were still many appalling stories to emerge from the illegitimate campaign of the Provisional IRA.
They had yet to receive proper attention in the Dublin media, he added.
“There are still many families waiting to hear the full details of how their loved ones were condemned by masked men without reference to even basic humanity,’’ said Mr Martin.
He said the end of the Provisional IRA campaign had marked a victory for democratic republicanism on the island, which was enabled by 1916.

But, and here is where the utter contradiction at the heart of his argument comes sharply into focus…

The agreed future ratified by the referendums North and South recognised, for the first time in history, the right of the people of this island to decide its future,’’ he added.

But the problem – in relation to his analysis, is that that ‘agreed future’ and those ‘referendums’ explicitly brought Sinn Féin into the heart of that process and in such a way as to, if not quite render the past irrelevant, make it more difficult to sustain precisely the sort of attacks on SF that he engages in above. It’s a sort of running with and against the logic of the GFA/BA simultaneously. He’s trying the old trick of saying that SF today is essentially SF in 1987. It’s an argument but the situation is different.

But in order to sustain that attack he has to leap back in time prior to the GFA/BA…

“At the core of their [SF] narrative lies the claim that the hidden leadership of the Provisional movement retained the right to kill and maim in our name in spite of constant rejection,’’ he added.
“For them, it retained the right to bomb civilians, to kneecap children and to have a parallel and secret justice system devoted to covering up the crimes of their members.’’

But clearly it stopped retaining that right during the process of implementation of the GFA/BA. This isn’t to wave away that past, but it is to suggest that his argument attempts to position SF in a narrative where little has changed.

There’s a broader discussion too, about the past and how to engage with it. I used to think that reconciliation and truth processes would be a good thing. Now, now I’m not so sure. Granted that last is perhaps making a virtue of necessity – there is going to be no such process, but there is part of me that wonders if any such process even were it possible to arrange would have any significant positive impact. Part of that is a utilitarian analysis too. Uncovering the past – even a past a few years gone, is hugely difficult. Uncovering a past of actions that by their nature were covert and concealed seems an order of magnitude greater.

This, by the by, isn’t either to dismiss inquiries into what occurred in the past, but a broader reconciliation and truth process seems more problematic than perhaps it once did.

And the past is an issue. I listen to Martin and I wonder who he is trying to reach in these attacks. Is it FG voters willing to be prised away from that party with a sort of FG lite rhetoric about Republicanism? Because another point is that all this is dipping into the distant past. For those of us old enough for the conflict to be a presence it is one thing. I wonder what it is like for those for whom it is not even a memory.

And I wonder what the political effect of that is.