Gerry Fitt brought Westminster and international attention to the corruption at the heart of the old Stormont state, writes Vincent Browne.
He did this at a time when journalism here and in Britain was not interested in the injustices of Northern Ireland and when the political establishment here (in the South) did not want to know.
Had Gerry Fitt done nothing else in his career but bring attention to what was going on in Northern Ireland his political career should be deemed a success. But he did more than that.
When it was dangerous and, in west Belfast, unpopular to bring attention to a new and more vicious injustice, the campaign of murder, maiming and mayhem of the IRA, Gerry Fitt did so, defiantly and courageously.
There were elements of his political career which were not so admirable, a tendency towards quick opportunism, an easy denigration of those he saw as opponents (John Hume, for instance), and the sad acceptance of a peerage, but these do not overshadow, or come near to doing so, what he achieved, and for that we should be grateful.
There was a nasty little piece in Daily Ireland on Saturday about Gerry Fitt. Aside from the nastiness, there was an odious triumphalism that reflects the mentality of some of those who call themselves republican.
The piece had begun with the claim: "When commentators talk about the Good Friday Agreement being Sunningdale for slow-learners they leave out one important element - the brand of nationalism represented by today's pro-United Ireland politicians and the diluted greenism of the SDLP circa 1972."
Then: "No one illustrated the Uncle Tomas brand of old nationalism better than Gerry Fitt . . . Fitt-style nationalists on the old Belfast Corporation or in Stormont were content to pay full price for seats at the back of the bus. They were unionism's plaything", in contrast to the abrasiveness of Sinn Féin representatives "who stood up for [the nationalist] people when the raiding parties in their Saracens came crashing through the barricades to drag neighbours off to prison camps and torture chambers". If powersharing, more robust all-Ireland institutions and no repeal of Articles 2 and 3 (ie, Sunningdale) be "diluted greenism", how would Daily Ireland characterise powersharing, small-scale all-Ireland institutions and the repeal of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution (ie, the Belfast Agreement)?
Yes there are a few elements to the Belfast Agreement that were not in the Sunningdale agreement - a more robust commitment to human rights and a commitment to devolve policing powers, but did they make such a difference? Or more particularly, did the difference go anywhere near justifying the slaughter of more than 1,000 people, the maiming of thousands of others and the ruination of countless lives? Gerry Fitt was among the first to protest about nationalists being at the back of the bus and, had more people paid heed to him from the time he went to Westminster in 1965, there might not have been anything like the carnage that followed. Gerry Fitt did protest about the Saracens and the torture and internment, but that is forgotten for he also condemned the barbarity of the IRA.
After a while Gerry Fitt saw only that barbarity and none of the other injustices and, to that extent, was partial. But how about those who now, with the benefit of dispassionate hindsight, remember only the injustices of Stormont and of the viciousness and arbitrariness of the British military response to the IRA campaign, and not at all the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the IRA? Had Gerry Fitt's politics been given time to mobilise, might not thousands of lives been saved?
Yes, I know, the benefits of hindsight and all that, but at least we might now acknowledge, lest anything like that ever arise again, that the campaign of slaughter was wrong, that there was no justification for the taking of a single human life (and I am not saying this from a pacifist position for I believe that the taking of human life can at times be justified, as, for instance, in apartheid South Africa, where injustice was so grave and politics so hopeless).
There is something odious and dangerous about the denigration of the likes of Gerry Fitt and the celebration of the lives of those who had part in the infliction of such pain.
I knew Gerry Fitt a bit. He was great company, funny, outrageous and mischievous. I knew a friend of his better. Paddy Kennedy, who is also dead now, was in Republican Labour with Gerry Fitt and he knew Fitt's mind better than Fitt did. Paddy could do an impersonation of Fitt which caught perfectly the man's cantankerousness, waywardness and humour, his inflections and mannerisms.
They fell out when Fitt joined the SDLP on condition he be made leader, leaving Paddy Kennedy alone in Republican Labour, certainly as its only public representative and perhaps its only member. I think Paddy thereafter grieved the loss of Fitt's friendship and camaraderie, although he would not have acknowledged that. Gerry Fitt left that sort of impression.