The Spectator’s Notes | 19 March 2005

Despite already knowing about the IRA’s involvement in the £26 million robbery of the Northern Bank, Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, last month approved a renewal of the exemption which allows Sinn Fein (and other political parties in the province) to raise money abroad. This privilege is denied to mainland parties which do not rob banks, such as the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. So the proposed ban on Sinn Fein fund-raising in America is, in effect, not supported by the country whose citizens were the victims of the robbery and of the Robert McCartney murder. An aspect of the funding exemption which deserves more attention is that it permits anonymous donations. Again, this is denied to the mainland parties. What it means is that Sinn Fein can accept laundered money with impunity, and that is precisely why the provision is there. I wonder if the party’s coffers have filled up since those of the Northern Bank have emptied.

On Breakfast with Frost on Sunday, David Blunkett recited some verse of his own devising: ‘One day when you are feeling important/ One day when your ego is in bloom/ One day when you feel you are the most important man in the room/ Take a bucket and fill it with water/ Put your arm in up to the wrist/ Pull it out and the hole that is left there/ Is the measure of how much you will be missed.’ Perhaps unconsciously, Mr Blunkett’s muse is echoing W.H. Auden’s poem ‘As I walked out one evening’. Auden’s narrator, on his evening walk down Bristol Street, hears a lover singing, ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you/ Till China and Africa meet’, etc. But the clocks in the city counter with a more cynical song (‘O let not Time deceive you,/ You cannot conquer Time’) and tell the listener, ‘O plunge your hands in water,/ Plunge them in up to the wrist;/ Stare, stare in the basin/ And wonder what you’ve missed.’