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These are regular editorials
produced alongside the corresponding issues on Nonviolent
News. |
Also in this editorial
It was been a bad couple of months for Sinn
Féin. Things began to go downhill with the failure
to reach agreement on restoring devolved government in Northern
Ireland, then the Northern Bank robbery was firmly linked
to the IRA by the British and Irish governments, who also
stated that Sinn Féin leadership knew about it beforehand.
The killing of Robert McCartney, allegedly by IRA men, raised
questions of whether the IRA could act with impunity but also
questioned support in key Catholic areas of the North, and
this story has continued to develop. The unfolding money laundering
saga in the Republic raised further questions about the involvement
of the IRA and Sinn Féin in such illegalities. From
a nonviolent point of view it may need pointed out that the
Northern Bank robbery was carried out with extreme duress
- the threat of hostage-taken family members being killed;
so this was not a victimless crime.
Have the 'republican movement' been caught trying
to have their violent cake and eat it? Undoubtedly. But if
illegality was the cause of banishment then half of the Fianna
Fail (and some other) councillors in Dublin would have been
out on their ear, and Tony Blair and the British government
would have been indicted for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Two wrongs do definitely not make one right but it is important
to have a sense of perspective; Sinn Féin are not the
only ones who have been up to no good. Loyalists too continue
their mixed bag of activities, the difference here being that
with little electoral support the loyalist paramilitaries
and their respective political groupings are not knocking
on the doors of Stormont power.
It has also been a case of old habits dying
hard. If you believe you are the very embodiment of Ireland,
factually or figuratively believing that you alone have the
true political analysis and/or apostolic succession from the
First Dáil, then you may believe that the ends not
only justify the means but that the ends make any means totally
justifiable without question. Right and wrong, violence and
non-violence, cease to exist in what is really a statist ideology;
we may not be the visible state but we are the legitimate
state and therefore we are entitled to wield what power we
want.
Many people were prepared to give Sinn Féin
the benefit of the doubt during a period of transition. While
the North is undoubtedly still in transition to internal,
democratic self government, it can be said that increasingly
people feel the period of the transition from the violent
Troubles is over, or certainly should be over. It is, after
all, nearly eleven years since the ceasefires and seven years
since the Good Friday Agreement. The patience of the public,
and the Irish government, has worn mighty thin. The outworking
of the Robert McCartney killing indicates once more the power
of organised popular opinion, even to force the IRA to take
action in expelling some of its members.
You can say that Sinn Féin has been used
to flying on two wings. Ever since the days of the hunger
strikes at the beginning of the 1980s, the ballot box and
the armalite have been those two wings (in other words, Sinn
Féin the political party, and the Irish Republican
Army as the military muscle). If this bird never flew on one
wing then it undoubtedly wanted to continue its competitive
advantage through continuing some aspect of those two wings.
And some people on one wing did not want to admit their time
was up. But the time for having those two wings is now up,
says Joe and Josephine Public.
But Sinn Féin does have another possible
wing it could add to its body, and we have said this before
though in different contexts. When 'the armed struggle' was
still the method, Sinn Féin and republican activists
did engage in political campaigning on issues of concern.
It was quite adept at such political campaigning and organising,
the hunger strike issue being the first in modern times where
it came to the fore. As the party sought to be considered
legit, and its voting strength increased, this campaigning
was consigned to the rubbish bin.
But if Sinn Féin rediscovered its radical,
community-based campaigning self, seeing any form of nonviolent
action as being a legitimate way of acting in a democracy
(or proto-democracy in the North), it could add an important
dimension to its overall work. While trust would not initially
be forthcoming from many other people, if its work on poverty,
inclusivity, asylum, anti-racism and so on, was genuine and
well-performed, it could earn that trust and add an important
dimension for change, not just to the party in its parliamentary
role, but also to the whole of society. Party politics can
be quite a narrow game; we are suggesting something broader.
But for this to work, Sinn Féin would have to be seen
to have renounced violence, illegal 'fundraising' and so on.
There is no easy way forward for Sinn Féin
in the current crisis it faces. But it will come out of it
some way or other. If it chooses to pursue a nonviolent course
in its fullness, utilising to its fullest capacity the possibilities
of nonviolent organising and campaigning, its faces a bright
future and will make a real contribution to building the Ireland
of tomorrow. Taking its supporters with it is problematic,
but falling between stools as it has been doing recently is
not going to help anyone.
We wish all the very best to the Pitstop Ploughshares activists
reaching the end of their trail to trial on 7th March (see
lead item in news section), and our congratulations to them
and to all those everywhere who have continued to resist the
militarisation of Ireland as it has sought to take its place
among the nations of the world involved in the military-industrial
complex. There are so many ironies in so many situations in
modern Ireland that it is difficult to know where to begin.
A former rural country (Ireland), with many ploughshares,
at the end of decades of violence in Northern Ireland, progressively
turns its ploughshares into swords and rather more modern,
and brutal, weapons of war, as indigenous and multinational
firms increasingly buy into war equipment profits. And the
government of a supposedly neutral country, the Republic,
has a totally abject attitude to the world superpower, the
USA, over the one facility in Ireland which that superpower
wanted - Shannon airport. Nearly 400,000 US troops have passed
through Shannon since 2002.
The original ethos of the Southern state on
its foundation showed resistance to the ideology of the then
dominant British superpower. It now displays a cringing subservience
to the superpower of today, the USA, and its economic dominance,
with no self awareness of the irony. Maybe when Fianna Fail
declares itself 'The Republican Party' it is closer than it
thinks to another Republican Party, that led by George W Bush.
with Larry Speight
Travel in Ireland can bring one into contact
with worldviews very different from that of modernity as defined
by ever more roads, cars, shopping malls, suburbia and belief
in the miraculous power of capitalism to solve problems of
poverty and pollution. One such worldview is contained in
the symbolism of Sheela-na-gigs. On a recent journey through
the less travelled bye-ways of Ireland I was delighted to
come across a Sheela-na-gig over the moss covered arch of
a ruined church in Killnaboy in County Clare. Sheela na-gigs
are carvings depicting female sexuality. They can be traced
back to the twelfth century but are thought to have a lineage
going back to pre-Christian times, and that prior to them
been carved in stone they were carved in wood. They are mainly
found in the walls of churches and castles, perhaps because
these were places of some permanence, authority and formality.
Their meaning has become lost in the passage of time, and
the scarce reference that is made to them in folklore is associated
with the power and wisdom of old women.
The main speculations about their purpose are
that they were to ward off misfortune, to warn against lust,
or were fertility figures. Some are thought to have powers
of healing. It is likely that they served a multitude of purposes
connected with the idea of Earth Mother - the wellspring of
life. As such they would have served to remind people that
through the cycles of living humankind is an integral part
of nonhuman nature, rather than separate from nonhuman nature
as the present dominant paradigm holds. Shela-na-gigs were
certainly revered and considered powerful images. When the
Church lost its Celtic identity they became an embarrassment,
considered ugly and obscene and many were destroyed. We will
thus never know how widespread they were. There are presently
just over 100 in Ireland and about 45 in Britain. In contemporary
terms their destruction might be akin to President Bush's
denigration of science, and ever creeping censorship, in an
attempt to deny forms of reality espoused by the large corporations
and their cohorts in government.
(An informative book on the subject, including a catalogue
of sites, is: The Sheela-Na-Gigs Of Ireland & Britain,
Joanne McMahon & Jack Roberts, (2001) Mercier Press, Dublin
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