Martin McGuinness’s campaign for the Irish Presidency is, of course, a disgusting affair. How could it ever be otherwise? But even by Sinn Fein’s grim standards, it’s off to a loathsome, disingenuous beginning. Speaking on Irish radio this morning, McGuinness complained that a coterie of “West Brits” in the Dublin media are out to get him.
Only someone whose loyalty to the Republic might be questioned by the more rancid brand of nationalist, you see, would be vulgar enough to bring up McGuinness’s murderious past. Indeed, it’s just “people who are hostile to my candidacy” who have the gall to mention McGuinness’s IRA past.
This is strange since, as Fintan O’Toole observes in today’s Irish Times, the IRA and McGuinness himself has never repudiated its past. The official line remains that every aspect of the armed struggle was “entirely legitimate”. Indeed, McGuinness was boasting about his past this morning: “I say to all of them: I go forward on my record. My record as a peacemaker, I think, is unequalled. Anywhere.”
Ignore the arrogance of this claim and reflect instead that McGuinness, like everyone else connected with Sinn Fein/IRA could only be a “peacemaker” because he was a terrorist. He wants the credit for a kind of peace without accepting his responsibility for the war. A conflict that, never forget, was unecessary and opposed, to one degree or another, by a majority of Irish nationalists.
Again and again, Sinn Fein types pretend there was something heroically necessary about their barbarism. But there was not and the existence, before it’s state-sanctioned evisceration, of the SDLP demonstrated that.
Even so, one may accept, with some reluctance, the shabby deals necessary to promote the Peace Process in Ulster as being better than othing even if, again, a Sinn Fein-DUP duopoly was scarcely the endgame imagined at the beginning or an outcome many people would have found attractive had they been told in 1993 that this was how it would all end. But unsavoury compromises in Northern Ireland are one thing; the Presidency of the Irish Republic quite another. The former accepts a certain reality; the latter would voluntarily embrace a wicked past, forgivig all when there’s no requirement to do so.
Never forget, either, that Sinn Fein spent decades denying the legitimacy of the Irish Republic. Now McGuinness aspires to be its titular head and asks all concerned to forget that he was part of an organisation that, tacitly at least, in a state of undeclared war against Dublin as well as, rather more actively, Belfast and London. Perhaps this is only a historical curiosity but Sinn Fein’s hostility to the legitimate government in Dublin is something that merits being remembered too.
Can he win? Finola Meredith says don’t count the bastard out; Mick Fealty says it’s unlikely and should really be seen as an attempt to position Sinn Fein as the only all-Ireland party and boost its profile in the Republic. I think Fealty is right (and see Conor Ryan for a good overview of this rum race for the Aras) and McGuinness is not best-placed to win the Presidency, even in a crowded field. That’s something but doesn’t make the prospect of listening to Sinn Fein whining that it’s unfair to harp on about the past any more attractive.
[Sinn Fein poster from 1918, courtesy of my old chum Ciaran Byrne]
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