Fintan O’Toole: Sinn Féin casts developer Tom McFeely as a villain and IRA man Tom McFeely as a hero

On Sunday, Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin had a typically eloquent opinion piece in the Sunday Independent. It was about the suffering of people who bought apartments from shoddy builders during the Celtic Tiger property boom.

Ó Broin began by evoking a moment from recent Irish history: the evacuation of the Priory Hall development in Dublin 11 years ago. “The developer, Tom McFeely, had failed to fix significant fire safety defects in the apartments that his company Coalport had built.”

Thus “the developer Tom McFeely” has a prominent place in Sinn Féin’s demonology of modern Ireland. And quite right too.

He was commanding officer of the IRA prisoners in Long Kesh and led the first hunger strike in 1980, which he endured for 53 days

But what, I wondered as I read the article, about “the IRA man Tom McFeely”? Are they by any chance related?

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They are of course one and the same person. In his other guise, McFeely was a hero for Sinn Féiners. He was commanding officer of the IRA prisoners in Long Kesh and led the first hunger strike in 1980, which he endured for 53 days.

Literal icon

His face was on posters carried by Sinn Féin protesters in Belfast, Dublin and London, making him a literal icon of the armed struggle.

Last week, just after the 50th anniversary of the IRA’s indiscriminate massacre of nine civilians in the Co Derry village of Claudy — including an eight-year-old girl and two teenage boys — Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s leader in Northern Ireland, told the BBC, “I think at the time there was no alternative” to the IRA’s violence.

[ IRA hunger striker and Priory Hall builder Tom McFeely sets up two new property firms ]

Ten years ago, in an interview for the Guardian, Susan McKay asked Tom McFeely how he felt about the Claudy massacre, which was perpetrated just a few miles from his own home. He told her he had not been involved, “but if I’d been there I would have planted the bombs. It is the reality of war. I only regret I wasn’t able to do more.”

Claudy — like the Enniskillen and Birmingham and La Mon and Bloody Friday and Shankill Road fish shop massacres — is covered by O’Neill’s blanket moral amnesty.

If there was “no alternative” but to do these things, McFeely is perfectly entitled to regret that he wasn’t there to blow little Kathryn Eakin to bits that day, as she washed the windows of her family’s shop. Or to shred the body of young William Temple, who was helping the milkman on his round.

Let’s leave aside the obvious lie at the heart of O’Neill’s claim, the way it is designed to obliterate the entire history of nonviolent struggle by the Catholic community in the North. Let’s pretend she doesn’t know that, for two decades of the Troubles, Sinn Féin was able to fight and win democratic elections.

Let’s not dwell on the way this glib idea of there being “no alternative” to massacre robs human beings — including IRA activists — of moral agency, making them mere products of circumstance who could not be expected to distinguish right from wrong.

Dizzying ambivalence

Let’s just think instead of where Sinn Féin stands in relation to a figure such as McFeely. In his double role as hero and villain, he embodies an ambivalence about the moral meaning of the past that is becoming ever more dizzying.

Let’s try to get this straight. There are two men in the same body: the IRA man and the property developer. One, apparently, is okay; the other is not.

The okay McFeely — maybe even the good and brave one who did what had to be done — is the one who would have been happy to burn children alive. The McFeely to be criticised is the developer who did not fix fire safety defects.

Now, I don’t wish for a moment to trivialise the suffering that McFeely created for the people unfortunate enough to have bought his apartments at Priory Hall. Nor do I doubt the authenticity of Ó Broin’s compassion for all those whose lives have been blighted by bad builders.

Sooner or later, Sinn Féin has to decide: does it want to keep carrying the “dead weight” of atrocity?

But I genuinely don’t understand how that suffering can loom so much larger in Sinn Féin’s imagination than the savagery of Claudy. In his opinion piece, Ó Broin wrote that reading the report of the working group on defective apartments “hits you like a dead weight”.

How, then, can actual massacres be so weightless? Why does one side of McFeely’s past exercise a strong gravitational pull while the other can float freely in the blameless atmosphere of “no alternative”?

If the excuse that “that was the way things were at the time” covers Claudy, it also covers Celtic Tiger property development. It’s as rotten an excuse for one as it is for the other.

Sooner or later, Sinn Féin has to decide: does it want to keep carrying the “dead weight” of atrocity? How long can it live with the hypocrisy of demanding accountability from everyone else for some sins of the past while covering others in a blanket of blandly amoral amnesia?