Sinn Fein is not a normal party. It sometimes feels impolite to point it out in the era of the Belfast Agreement. But the legal amnesty from criminal charges offered to IRA terrorists as part of the peace process does not oblige individuals to abstain from moral judgement of their political wing. Especially when it continues to venerate those terrorists.
The past year offered a grim reminder of this when the party’s leadership turned out in force, in the middle of lockdown, for a show of strength at the funeral of Bobby Storey, a Provisional IRA ‘volunteer’ who spent 20 years in prison for various offences.
But yesterday offered an especially visceral reminder when Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein’s leader in Northern Ireland, led a series of official tributes to mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Tom McElwee, who starved himself to death on hunger strike in prison.
McElwee was in prison for a firebombing attack in which Yvonne Dunlop, a 27-year-old mother of three, was burned alive. Her name does not appear in Sinn Fein’s remembrances.
That absence is telling. Yes, in a post-conflict society such as Northern Ireland there must always be a degree of gritting one’s teeth and leaving the past in the past. But that is not what Sinn Fein is doing. Instead, they are actively commemorating murderers such as McElwee while drawing a veil over their victims as part of a very effective campaign to shape popular memory of the past.
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