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Easter
Sunday, and all over Ireland various parties, militias,
cults and sects were on the march. Even councillors
who traipsed off to British war graves or cenotaphs
would today put on their republican false faces and
pretend that their politics and those of the men and
women in the graves they stood at were somehow similar.
When I visit the republican plot in Belfast the thing
furthest from my mind is the politics of Sinn Fein,
which sit like an ugly scar defiling the very sacrifice
inscribed in each republican grave. Even more nauseating
is the sight of some Sinn Fein leaders who have risen
to prominence on the backs of those who lost their
lives recoiling in shame at suggestions that they
may have been IRA comrades of the dead. How often
must we listen to the cock crow?
I
didn't attend any of today’s events. It taxed
me to even put out a tricolour. I am uncomfortable
with flags and flag wavers. Too many of them and Nuremburg
dawns on the horizon. Even when I fly the Palestinian
flag, it is not a statement about Palestinian nationalism,
but rather a protest about the murderous policies
of the Israeli state directed against Palestinian
people. As for the hoisting of the tricolour, my wife
insisted on it. And as she can't reach from the bedroom
to the flagpole holder, the task falls to me. She
also flies the Stars and Stripes on July 4 and September
11. She is a US citizen and has a strong sense of
identity with her homeland. Hanging that up falls
to me as well. But people with sharply differing views
can live together quite easily without feeling the
need to stand on principle over such matters in the
home. My friends in the SWP gently rib me about the
US flag. I suppose it gives a few knuckle shufflers
elsewhere something to crow about, but who cares?
Tomorrow
in Derry Marian Price will be the main speaker at
a republican commemoration. As it sits presently,
I am tempted to take my daughter Firinne up there.
We may then go on to Donegal after it and spend some
time with Tommy Gorman. It would be a good way to
tire the child out. By the time she is back in Belfast
she will be ready for bed, if she hasn't already succumbed
to sleep in Shando's car. The last time he and I went
to Derry it was to a SEA conference and we broke down
this side of Toome. But we got there eventually and
almost had a mental breakdown listening to some of
the conference speakers. A smoother journey and less
cumbersome ideologues tomorrow, hopefully.
Why
Derry and Marian Price? I suppose if it were not for
the fact that we are personal friends, I would not
go up. I do not subscribe to the philosophy of the
32 County Sovereignty Movement, and not just for its
association with the Real IRA. Its blind adherence
to a totalising nationalism that has no greater a
right to call on our allegiance than Catholicism is
odious and jars with my awkward intellectual and emotional
attachment to the right to dissent. Nationalism attracts
me only in proportion to the extent that it permits
people to opt out of its schema for the nation. Priests,
whether ideological or theological, when beyond my
visual and audible range make life much more bearable.
But
at least tomorrow, Marian and her movement will be
honouring those who were alongside us during the conflict
but fell as a result of it. And there is a certain
poignancy involved in standing alongside others, even
if fundamentally opposed to me, in silent and reflective
tribute to those with whom we at one time shared arms.
There
was no chance of my having gone over to Milltown today
where there was a choice of two Stick parades. Years
ago, as the Sinn Fein parade and the original Sticks
met at the cemetery gates there would be abuse, mostly
verbal, exchanged between the two. Today, the casual
observer would experience difficulty distinguishing
which is which, with both factions shouting 'up Stormont'
at each other. A visitor attending a Workers Party
commemoration in the mid-seventies and listening to
Des O'Hagan would, were he to attend a Sinn Fein one
today, be excused for thinking that Des had merely
grown a few inches in the intervening years but had
still retained the beard and glasses. What would Gerry
Adams be saying today that O'Hagan hadn't said all
those years ago and which we would uproariously laugh
at? There is not much novel in a statement laced with
references to the need to bring back Stormont, reform
the police, secure a bill of rights and oppose all
who resist with arms. Small wonder that when a Sinn
Fein parade was goose-stepping its way through Dublin
today to the air of 'take it down from the mast Irish
traitors', a woman confronted the marchers and shouted,
'take it down from the mast yourselves boys.' My sole
thought was to recall the words of Cardinal Richelieu
- "give me six lines written by the most honorable
of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang
him." Of the vocal woman I thought, "Watch
they don't hang you from the mast in its stead, Mrs."
Their attitude towards those who disagree with them
has won them few prizes for tolerance over the years.
Good
Friday and Easter Sunday are a mere two days apart.
But the gap between what Good Friday republicanism
achieved and the objectives Easter Sunday republicans
died to secure can be understood only in light years.
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