Stakeholder

Being threatened is not a pleasant experience. I should know. Thanks to my political involvement and a five year stint on the Policing Board I received both verbal and written threats. Sometimes it went further with personal physical assaults and attacks on my home or car. In the main these threats came from members and supporters of Sinn Fein.  The perceived wisdom of the day was to say nothing; keep your head down and get on with it. On joining the Policing Board, Newry Sinn Fein labelled me and others as traitors and one Easter Sunday I got singled out for special mention by the then local Sinn Fein MLA. Back then some in Sinn Fein openly encouraged attacks on Policing Board members.  Back then some of their less articulate followers spurred on by careless rhetoric took unilateral action allowing Sinn Fein to escape their responsibilities. 

Today, there is a wry pleasure in knowing that some of those doing the taunting now openly support the PSNI and serve on District Policing Partnerships. Others such as the then Sinn Fein MLA are no longer members of that party having being dumped for not fitting in with Armani republicanism. It is all too easy to forget in the West Wing version of modern day Provisional revisionism that many in the SDLP bore the burden of attacks from militant republicans and loyalists. 

Nevertheless that was back then. 

The threats by dissident republicans against Martin McGuinness and his family are both deplorable and despicable. He is right to say that these individuals are ‘betraying the desires and political aspirations of all the people who live on this island and they don’t deserve to be supported’.  Over the past thirty years Seamus Mallon, Joe Hendron and Eddie Mc Grady could have said likewise about the IRA.  To maverick militants and old style republicans the progressive and political maturity of the Sinn Fein leadership in abandoning militarism, supporting the police and signing up to devolution built on the principle of consent is not so much a u- turn as a sell out. While these dissidents are mistaken and that they have neither solutions nor support seems irrelevant amid the haze of perverted history handed down to them. 

This perversion has been passed down through militant republicanism from one generation to the next and in each generation some are conditioned to remain unreformed.  

In 1913 Pearse said ‘We pledge ourselves to follow in the steps of Tone, never to rest until his work is accomplished, deeming it the proudest of all privileges to fight for freedom….fighting on whether victory seems far or near’.  In 1914 as Redmond laboured for his Home Rule goal by supporting the British in the Great War; Pearse’s colleagues deemed him a traitor saying that ‘Mr Redmond is no longer entitled, through his nominees, to any place in the administration or guidance of the Irish Volunteer movement’. 

Four years later Michael Collins rejected the notion of partition by saying ‘Any scheme of government which does not confer upon the people of Ireland, the supreme, absolute and final control of all of this country, external as well as internal will not be accepted’. In 1921, accepting the inevitable Collins was condemned by former colleague Liam Mellowes who said; ‘we who stand by the Republic will stand against the new government that would be set up if this Treaty is passed’. 

More recently in 1990 calling on the legacy bequeathed to them; some of the present leadership of Sinn Fein issued a statement saying ‘We believe that Irish people have the right to use armed struggle in the context of seeking Irish Independence and in the continued condition of British occupation of the six counties’.  

The difference seems to be that present day Sinn Fein supported ‘their’ armed struggle against partition not ‘anyone’s’ armed struggle as waged by dissidents. To the dissidents, like Erskine Childers before; those accepting of any Treaty either in 1921 or 1998 ‘cannot escape the fact that Irish Ministers will be the King’s Ministers and that every administrative function in Ireland would be performed in the name British Government’.  

Sinn Fein has taken to the road to explain its case to communities once enthralled with the kind of militant republican rhetoric which told the Irish Times in 1991 ‘those who are left to finish the unfinished business will do so’. In 2009 for Martin, his family and the rest of us –let’s hope that reason routs the legacy of redundant militant rhetoric.