It should have been Sinn Fein's year. The 90th anniversary
of the Easter Rising and the 25th anniversary of
the hunger strikes were destined to merge as one
seamless thread of continuous resistance and struggle,
and send the party strutting along the stage of
Irish nationalism bathed in the light of adulation;
the carriers of the eternal flame fuelled by the
blood of the 1916 leaders and the ten men who died
in 1981. It has hardly turned out that way. The
Easter Rising thunder was siphoned off by Bertie
Ahern and Fianna Fail. Not too hard to do. The choice
was between Real Fianna Fail and Provisional Fianna
Fail at a point when the latter could no longer
expect to benefit from a sleaze-free image. Sinn
Fein since 1998 have more than sufficiently demonstrated
that they are Good Friday rather than Easter Sunday
republicans. It is inane to march past Dublin's
GPO chanting 'administer British rule' and expect
to win accolades.
As
if that were not bad enough, the hunger strikes
are proving to be a lot more thorny. The Sinn Fein
leadership just can't grasp the baton passed on
by ten dead men without recoiling from the prick
of the barb. Rather than basking in reflected glory,
they are facing questions in the media which, when
stripped of their velvet sheath, sound ominously
like 'did you kill help six of the hunger strikers?'
Anniversary
years have not been kind to Sinn Fein. The party's
centenary year, 2005, had already been destroyed
by the killers of Robert McCartney. 2006, where
such key anniversaries as 1916 and 1981 in other
circumstances would have been a launching pad for
greater things, has been overshadowed by the towering
figure of Richard O'Rawe, resisting all the intimidating
invective, slander and innuendo that the diminutive
party sandbags have thrown his way as they desperately
try to protect their leader; the very source of
their own status, with whom they have been complicit,
their fates are intertwined.
O'Rawe's
charge is simple. The British government made an
offer to end the hunger strike prior to the death
of Joe McDonnell. The prison leadership said 'deal',
informed key republican leaders on the outside of
their position, and sat back in nervous anticipation
that the British would immediately proceed to initiate
arrangements that would prevent further loss of
life resulting from prison protest. To their chagrin
the same leaders said 'no deal.'
Since
O'Rawe's book Blanketmen was published last
year, much speculation has centred around the motives
of that leadership element which was operating without
the knowledge or approval of the bulk of those on
the army council. Amongst those who find O'Rawe
plausible there has emerged signs of a consensus
that the guiding strategic objective of the then
adjutant general of the IRA was to ensure that the
hunger strike continued until at least the seat
'only borrowed' by Bobby Sands had been safely secured
by a Sinn Fein member.
After
the death of the sixth hunger striker, Martin Hurson,
dark murmurings were beginning to simmer in the
wing O'Rawe was held on. In conversation with one
of the central figures on our own wing at the time
I made the point that that if the rumours coming
out of O'Rawe's wing were true, then whoever repeated
them might end up dead themselves. Since Blanketmen
appeared on the shelves he has reminded me of the
conversation each time we discuss O'Rawe's allegations.
Nevertheless,
the jail was nothing if not a hot bed of distortion.
Perspectives that would fly nowhere else would soar
to great heights in that place. If gremlins were
beginning to appear there would be enough conspiracy
theorists to give them fair wind. But most people
would have viewed untoward occurrences in the management
of the hunger strike as the result of human error
and miscalculation rather than Machiavellian manipulation
in what was a precarious odyssey. No choice was
easy; even less could it be guaranteed that success
would follow. There certainly would have been few
takers for the view that the foremost Provisional
IRA leader for what was then the best part of a
decade, would be contemplating electoral glory at
the cost of our comrades' lives.
To
believe that prominent republicans were capable
of sabotaging a deal that would end the hunger strike
to suit their own electoral ambitions, we would
have had to entertain the seemingly absurd notion
that those pursuing such an end would at some point
seek to surrender IRA weapons, install Ian Paisley
in a returned Stormont as leader of a partitioned
Northern Ireland statelet and call for republicans
to hand themselves over to the Diplock courts to
experience the dubious merits of British justice.
It is easy to conceive of such people as being endowed
with characters of such malignancy that they would
readily regard votes as more important than republican
lives.
Now
who in their right minds in 1981 would ever have
imagined that there was anyone like that in our
ranks?
