Sinn Féin’s past: amnesia, obfuscation and porky pies?

Hitler’s Germany was conquered one metre at a time and every metre was fully contested by the German army even though the eventual outcome could never have been in serious doubt once enemy troops breached the country’s borders. Aachen was the first major city to be captured from the west in October 1944. It took the allies another six months to reach the Rhine, only 120 kilometres further east. From the east, the Red army crossed into Germany in January 1945. It took them three months to cover the 200 kilometres to Berlin.

However, as Harald Jahner records in the recently published Aftermath: Life in the fallout of the Third Reich 1945–1955:

Wherever the Allies had taken a stretch of land everything was suddenly peaceful. …these Germans, who had gone on fighting furiously long after the situation had been proven hopeless, were revealed as the tamest of lambs as soon as they had capitulated.

There were a few isolated, pointless “Werewolf” atrocities, directed almost exclusively at war-weary Germans, but almost no manifestations of “hatred” against their conquerors.

Where had they gone, the proud master race, who would supposedly rather have died than endure any form of foreign rule? It wasn’t just the occupiers who contemplated this question, many Germans did too. Most of them had dropped their loyalty to the Fuhrer as if flicking a switch — and at the same time wiped clean, at least in their own minds, the whole of the past.

Indeed, the damage Germans had inflicted on others during the war disappeared from the collective memory to be replaced by collective complaint about the suffering Germans had to endure after it. Mr. Jahner quotes an article from 1946 on the travails of the teaching profession that elevates to hyperbole the transition from wartime to aftermath.

The lurching unconsciousness into which the German people were plunged by the mendacious lunacy of the subhumanity that had arisen to power was followed by the inevitable collapse, the most shocking physical and mental hardship that any people has been forced by fate to endure.

The first part of this sentence signposts how post-war Germany dealt with the Holocaust, the elephant in a room full of war “crimes”. In Mr. Jahner’s view:

The murder of the European Jews represents a crime whose seriousness affected the subsequent life of every German and plunged them into the undertow of the unsayable as soon as they thought about it. This is why the majority of Germans did not immediately face up to their guilt. Germans kept their heads down, they grew tongue-tied, they chattered away unmoved, manically, as if they had been wound up.

He cites this “confession” of guilt from August 1945 by the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference for what are vaguely described as “crimes against freedom and dignity”, which points the finger squarely though not exclusively at Hitler and his cabal.

We regret it deeply. Many Germans, including some from our ranks, allowed themselves to be beguiled by the false doctrines of National Socialism, and remained indifferent to crimes against human freedom and human dignity. Many, though, were complicit in the crimes through their attitudes, and many became criminals themselves.

For most of his time in office from 1933 and through most of the war, Hitler was able to rely on the voluntary support of the broad majority in Germany. Only towards the end of the war did the SS and the Gestapo have to co-erce continued civilian co-operation. But this short period provided enough “cover” for the bulk of former Party supporters to see themselves as Hitler’s victims rather than his enablers.

The Irish Times of 22 February published an opinion piece by Anne Harris reflecting on an RTE Claire Byrne Live “special” the previous week about Sinn Féin. The sub-headline posed this question to Sinn Féin:

How does the party appeal to the over-40s without confronting the past?

Ms. Harris posed the question differently but more specifically in the body of the article with a somewhat forced juxtaposition:

As we approach the half-way stage of this Government, Sinn Féin finds itself on the horns of a dilemma: does it campaign on fixing the housing crisis — something that is difficult if not impossible in one term? Or does it confront the past with genuine remorse for the IRA’s indefensible violence?

There is only limited resemblance between Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 and where Ireland stands now in relation to the Troubles. The Nazi regime was underpinned if not always sustained by violence and the end of the war simultaneously extinguished the movement, the regime and the violence.

Contemporary Sinn Féin dates from the 1970s as a party rather than a regime which initially relied on violence to promote its aims. It transitioned in the latter part of the Troubles to a parallel track of a ballot box in one hand and an Armalite in the other before foreswearing violence altogether in the era of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That last event could loosely be described as the point of transition from “Troubles” to peace. And that new uneasily peaceful normality has endured for a quarter century. Peace is not invulnerable but is well established.

For most of the Troubles, including most of its “parallel track” incarnation, Sinn Féin was regarded as disqualified from participation in negotiations aimed at a political settlement because of its violence and despite any democratic mandate it might have had. There is scope for argument about whether that disqualification or exclusion accelerated or delayed its eventually “coming in from the cold”. There is also scope for argument about whether the whiff of gunsmoke or blood on its hands delayed or accelerated its achievement of political ascendancy within the nationalist community in the North.

Now though, it is well and truly ensconced within the house of politics, sitting at the fireside, in government as the leading nationalist party in the North and in pole position to lead the next government in the republic. Also the Troubles are a historic rather than current reality. The goalposts of consideration of its fitness or suitability for participation in government in the south have shifted.

Of course, individual voters can vote as they like for whatever reasons they like and some may decide to withhold their vote from Sinn Féin solely because of the party’s past record of violence. But, it is hard to regard as anything more than stubborn “dogma” the “argument” that Sinn Féin’s past association with violence is sufficient in itself to disqualify it from participation in government in the republic now — for four reasons.

First, they participate in government in the North, based on a strong democratic mandate and with at least the tacit blessing of successive Irish governments. It is hard to argue credibly that what is good enough for the North is unacceptable in the South.

Second, with the passage of time it is diminishingly credible to visit the sins of their political ancestors on the party’s present leadership. It is hard to see Mary Lou McDonald brandishing an AK47 even in the privacy of her home.

Third, all governments in the South have included either or both of the parties that have their origins in the War of Independence and the Civil War of a century ago. It is a more distant time than the Troubles and a different context, but nobody would post a credible case for those civil war parties being “barred” from government for that reason, certainly not now and probably at any time during almost all of the past century.

Last, even if it doesn’t make it to government after the next election, Sinn Féin is likely to get the first preference vote of between one in every five and one in every three voters, probably more than any other party. In itself, that is a solid democratic mandate. But, in addition, other parties will want to get as many of the lesser but high preferences from those voters and will not want to alienate or antagonise them by effectively accusing them of being fellow travellers in violence.

So, instead of full frontal attacks, Sinn Féin is being subjected to milder but ostensibly more tenable criticisms.

One is that there is a lingering strain of “sneaking regardism” or coded manifestations of respect for its murkier past. This, from Anne Harris:

Asked [on Claire Byrne Live] whether, in government in the Republic, Sinn Féin would refuse to give those with criminal (IRA) convictions jobs as special advisers, his [Matt Carthy] answer was a defiant “No”.

Second, it should disown, indeed apologise for that past, for the damage it caused, partly because that is simply a right thing to do, but partly also to consign that past firmly to the past — because it is not assuredly there yet. Ms. Harris cites the frequently mentioned case of Paul Quinn, murdered as recently as 2007, especially potent because it post-dates the Good Friday Agreement and which Sinn Féin have slithered around rather than confront.

Third, it should be more transparent, especially to facilitate victims or relatives of victims of IRA actions in knowing the full truth about the violence done to them. Sinn Féin’s silence and protestations of impotence on this stands in marked contrast to the volume of its indignation that the British security forces might not be held to account for their “crimes” during the Troubles.

A bit like the German Catholic Bishops in 1945, Sinn Féin tries to project itself as being “straight” on the morality of the IRA campaign while ducking all of these arguments. Mary Lou McDonald’s interview of 24 May 2020 with The Sunday Independent illustrates the miasmic template.

“I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign.” This is about as square a circle as you might wish to see. If it was justified, why does she wish it didn’t happen? Surely, she should be comfortable if not glad that it did?

But, she adds a third dimension of contortion with the following:

It was inevitable; it was utterly inevitable and anybody with even a passing sense of Irish history could have predicted it surely as night followed day.

Well, if it was inevitable, then whether it was justified or not doesn’t arise because there was no dimension of optionality or contingency in the matter. And does Ms. McDonald have enough intelligence to be Taoiseach if she wishes that something inevitable hadn’t happened. More seriously, describing something as inevitable strips those involved of any association with choice or responsibility. It implies that participants in IRA violence were involuntary instruments of history rather than normal human beings endowed with the power of agency in their actions. While many young people did join the IRA during the Troubles, indeed possibly felt compelled to do so, many young people from similar backgrounds and contexts did not.

And perhaps on a lesser scale of importance, we have seen more recent evidence of Sinn Féin’s relationship with the truth being more slippery than firm, transactional rather than absolute. There was the deletion from its website of myriad policy statements that reflected a greater warmth towards Russia than is currently fashionable. Hotter off the presses was this report from The Irish Times yesterday.

In a party-produced European Newsletter which has been sent to foreign diplomats in Dublin, Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald argues that unification has never been so widely discussed before.

“It is being talked about in every town and city in Ireland, not in aspirational tones but as a realistic, achievable and necessary future.”

Really? I can say only that in none of my village’s four pubs, the local community centre or the sidelines of the local GAA pitch do I hear of Irish unification being talked of in any tones at all.

But let’s go back to Mr. Jahner for a finish. His overall verdict on the mental and moral gymnastics of post-war Germans was this.

The collective agreement of most Germans to count themselves among Hitler’s victims amounts to an intolerable insolence. Seen from the perspective of historical justice this kind of excuse — like the overwhelmingly lenient treatment of the perpetrators — is infuriating.

But, and it’s a big “but”:

For the establishment of democracy in West Germany, however, it was a necessary prerequisite because it formed the mental basis for a new beginning. The conviction that one had been Hitler’s victim was the precondition for being able to shed all loyalty to the fallen regime without feeling dishonourable, cowardly or opportunistic.

You must form your own view of whether sleeping ghosts are sometimes better left lie or whether it is always better to hunt down the truth relentlessly until it is cornered and confronted. Opening the curtains lets in the sunlight but reveals the dirt