How Northern Ireland’s past continues to impede its present and its future was again demonstrated over the past week in the response to the death of senior Sinn Féin and former IRA member Brendan “Bik” McFarlane.
In remembering their colleague, Sinn Féin figures such as leader Mary Lou McDonald and North Belfast Assembly member Gerry Kelly chose to focus on a sanitised version of McFarlane’s life while avoiding mention of the death and suffering he caused.
In paying tribute to “a great patriot”, as McDonald described him, they focused on his role as the IRA prison commanding officer during the 1981 H-Block hunger strikes in which 10 men died, and how he was one of the leaders of the mass escape of republican prisoners from the Maze in 1983. In that breakout one prison officer died from a heart attack after he was stabbed while a second officer was shot in the head but survived.
Neither McDonald nor Kelly made mention of McFarlane’s membership of an IRA gang that carried out a sectarian gun and bomb attack on the Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road in 1975 in which five Protestants were murdered, the youngest of them 17-year-old Linda Boyle and another an Ulster Volunteer Force member.
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Nor did they refer to how there was firm evidence that McFarlane was part of the IRA group that kidnapped supermarket executive Don Tidey in 1983 . When they were discovered in Derrada Wood in Co Leitrim they shot dead Garda trainee Gary Sheehan and Army private Patrick Kelly. The Garda loss of vital items played a significant part in McFarlane avoiding conviction.
Not surprisingly this omission did not go unnoticed, with much criticism of the Sinn Féin leadership’s failure to at least acknowledge the Bayardo Bar killings or make reference to Derrada Wood. Former Fine Gael minister for justice Charlie Flanagan described McDonald’s tribute to McFarlane as “nauseating”.
DUP MLA Philip Brett reflected how the Sinn Féin accolades played among unionists. “I was raised never to speak ill of the dead, and I recognise that a family is hurting,” he said, “but my community and my constituency hurt every single day as a result of Mr McFarlane’s action. Sinn Féin’s failure even to acknowledge that fact is nothing short of a disgrace.”
It is a fair point. How can there be political progress in Northern Ireland when the largest party, Sinn Féin, deals in evasion and half-truths?
The response to McFarlane’s death has highlighted how the past still causes grief and trauma to the bereaved and survivors of the Troubles. It also reinforces the point that the history of the conflict must not be rewritten or elided. If what is called the legacy of the Troubles is not properly addressed, politics will continue to be stunted.
