Voters are in no mood for cautionary tales about Sinn Féin

The genius of the dating coach – currently undergoing a revival thanks to the epidemic of loneliness – lies in recycling the eternal verities. One of these goes that, at the beginning of a relationship, everyone presents their idealised selves. Another is that trying to change a person is pointless – when someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Many voters, if polls are accurate, are enjoying the first, fine, careless rapture of romance with Sinn Féin. They are in no mood for cautionary tales – as exemplified by the remarkable life of SDLP warrior Bríd Rodgers, recently recounted in these pages – about not heeding the signs.

Right now, Sinn Féin is presenting its best self, promising to solve the housing crisis and reassuring foreign direct investment. And its vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, is telling us exactly who they are.

In a way, the evolution to a peace currently unperfected by powersharing is the tale of these two women.

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Voters are in no mood for cautionary tales about Sinn Féin

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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill is rapidly becoming a political heavy hitter

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One is 88 years old, began her political journey before the Troubles, in the dark days of discrimination, but with her party spearheaded the drive for peace and powersharing. The other, a little over half that age, began her political career in the peace of the Belfast Agreement, but feels compelled to honour people of violence and commemorate the IRA dead.

Michelle O’Neill, vice-president of Sinn Féin and Stormont first minister-designate, doesn’t just tell us occasionally about Sinn Féin’s historic ties to the IRA – she does so repeatedly. Last week she defended Sinn Féin MP John Finucane’s decision to address a commemoration of the infamous South Armagh IRA brigade, which targeted civilians as well as security forces during the Troubles.

Last year, she attended the unveiling of a monument to three IRA men who were members of the GAA. In 2019, she was at an event in Keady, Co Armagh commemorating an IRA man killed during an ambush on a British Army unit. In 2017, she addressed a commemoration in the village of Cappagh, Co Tyrone for eight IRA men killed as they attempted to blow up Loughgall police station.

Her rhetoric may have toned down over the years to an insistence that “everyone has a right to commemorate their dead”. But, with 3,500 killed, over half of them civilians, and 60 per cent at the hands of the IRA, the brute fact is that a great many of those “dead” were killed by those she commemorates.

Last August, O’Neill was unequivocal in her belief that there was “no alternative” to the IRA’s armed campaign during the Troubles. She was asked by BBC podcaster Mark Carruthers if she still felt it was right “at the time, for members of your family and others, to engage in violent resistance to British rule here.” She replied: “I think at the time there was no alternative.”

But was there an alternative? A penetrating interview with Bríd Rodgers, former deputy leader of the SDLP, Belfast Agreement negotiator and former Stormont agriculture minister, by Irish Times journalist Gerry Moriarty, attests to a different narrative. In fact, Rodgers is a living embodiment of the “alternative.” Over the course of four decades of hard, attritional political work, Rodgers, along with her SDLP comrades, beat the path to the Belfast Agreement. Rodgers described an arduous journey, from civil rights campaigner in 1965 to becoming SDLP deputy leader. She gives a graphic account of fighting unionist discrimination against Catholics in jobs and housing, gerrymandering in the voting system, and the special powers legislation.

[ ‘It is about sharing ... not about winning’ - SDLP veteran Bríd Rodgers fears talk of a united Ireland ]

In her account, discrimination has a closed, mean face. She tells of the local Craigavon hospital which employed Catholic nurses but only one Catholic “sister,” because “she was prepared to work nights”. There were no Catholic clerical officers or managers on the local council, but there was a Catholic caretaker and a Catholic cleaning woman at the council swimming pool.

They were tough times, and when the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which included Protestants and trade unionists, was supplanted by violence, Rodgers and her comrades found its natural successor in the SDLP. There, as in NICRA, their credo was a bill of rights, not bombs and bullets. To them, bombing Protestants in retaliation for discrimination on jobs and housing was disproportionate.

Rodgers is a mythic figure – in part because she saw and fought all the injustice and has not a trace of bitterness.

But also because while so many others are gone – John and Pat Hume, Seamus Mallon, Eddie McGrady, Ivan Cooper, Austin Currie, David Trimble – she remains. What she sees is a barren landscape, and a tendency towards what she calls “triumphalism”.

Rodgers is the shoulders on which O’Neill stands. But it would be a great mistake to underestimate Michelle O’Neill. Underneath the bravado is a shrewd politician. She is charismatic, knows her membership and is unfazed by media scrutiny on “transparency”.

There is speculation in some quarters that she may be Sinn Féin’s candidate in the presidential election which, after all these years, could still turn on the peace process, which she is adept at “owning”. King Charles was charmed at Stormont when she thanked his mother “for her role in our peace”. Her attendance at his coronation has been noted as a “presidential” act – unlike perhaps her attendance at commemorations of IRA violence. Nobody could accuse O’Neill of not telling us who she is. We should, as the dating coaches say, believe her.