Kathy Sheridan: Sinn Féin presents middle class with dilemma

On Sunday, Daniel Keohane announced to Twitter that he had joined the Sinn Féin party because he said, he was “sick and tired of the heretofore politics on this island. Including by SF, but I think they are the only party that genuinely offers something not only different, but also badly needed. Most importantly helping the poor among us.”

No surprise there. What distinguished this recruit, however, was his professional profile and his timing. Keohane is a senior research fellow at Dublin City University with a background in EU foreign, defence and security policy – a self-confessed “outlier” among Sinn Féiners on foreign and defence policy.

As for timing, his Twitter reveal appeared on the 50th anniversary of internment without trial and the Ballymurphy massacre. It also coincided with one of Sinn Féin’s regular commemorations of deceased IRA volunteers.

On Sunday morning, his party had posted a video tribute commemorating the death 40 years ago of 23-year-old hunger striker Thomas McElwee, “kind and good-natured”, “a political prisoner; bowed and unbroken” and featuring a poignant clip of McElwee’s eight sisters as his pall-bearers.

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It was followed by a tribute from Sinn Féin deputy leader Michelle O’Neill, who added – as Gaeilge – that he died for Irish freedom. There was also a tribute from the party’s youth branch. Its Seanad leader, Senator Niall Ó Donnghaile, was among those who retweeted the video which has had about 450,000 views.

Burned alive

Online, the reaction soon became less about McElwee’s sacrifice than the reason for his imprisonment in the first place. He was barely 19 when captured in 1976 after a bomb he and others were transporting exploded prematurely causing him to lose an eye. Yvonne Dunlop, a 26-year-old mother of three, was burned alive when one of the firebombs destroyed Alley Katz, her parents’ little clothes shop where she worked. She had seconds to shout a warning to her nine-year-old son when the bomb went off. McElwee was convicted of her murder, a verdict later reduced to manslaughter.

Who knows what kind of man McElwee might have become in different circumstances? An image tweeted by Ógra Sinn Féin, purporting to be his “last wish”, asked forgiveness “from everyone” and included his desire “to live among the people as a social worker and promote peace and harmony among Catholics and Protestants and also with the British”.

Yet the story of Yvonne Dunlop’s short life, terrible death and motherless children was entirely omitted from the Sinn Féin narrative.

What would the dying Thomas McElwee have made of the pseudonymous Stephen na hÉireann and many others who dismissed any criticism of her omission as cheap political point scoring – “Who’ll remember [Yvonne Dunlop’s] name next week? Next month? Next year? Not one . . . unless there’s another political gain to be had from it. She’s just another victim to be used as today’s stick. It’ll be someone else in a few days . . . with the same pearl-clutching antics.”

What would the aspirant peace advocate have made of some Ulster unionists’ responses to the video? “You’ll never reach my community until this is recognised as plain wrong . . . If Sinn Féin can’t stand over political violence and murder now, why does it glorify those who did it in the past?” Or of the AthenrySF Twitter account which responded with a (now deleted) message that “if you support the oppression of the native people within a country, and you do if you’re a unionist, you don’t deserve to be listened to”?

Existential challenge

This was the febrile atmosphere into which Daniel Keohane lobbed his announcement on Sunday afternoon. The exchanges that followed were in many cases a distillation of middle-class Ireland’s agitation over an existential challenge: how to endorse/consider Sinn Féin’s economic policies while sucking up its brisk injunctions to move on from the past – and how to square that with the party’s glorification of killers whose political contemporaries included John Hume and Seamus Mallon.

Keohane tried.

On Sunday, he acknowledged that “a lot of people were understandably upset” about the Sinn Féin video. “What [McElwee] did to a civilian – burning a woman alive – was truly awful. Do these same people understand why he joined PIRA in the first place? Or why he died after 62 days on hunger strike? We have to discuss all this openly.”

Later he noted that “an awful lot of people” were upset with him about it. “I don’t condone what PIRA did, and I recognise that and am proud of the Republic I grew up in. I support what Sinn Féin wants for this island, for all people on this island, democratically decided. Sin E.”

On Monday morning, his predicament was crystallised in his response to a prominent academic: “We agree that democracy is the only way forward as per the GFA [Good Friday/Belfast Agreement], not returning to violence or glorifying a selective past, including the murder by Tom McElwee of an innocent civilian, Yvonne Dunlop.” But wasn’t that precisely what Michelle O’Neill had done on Sunday? Yes, he said and he didn’t agree with it.

And there’s the crux. The point of disagreement is not that atrocities in living memory were not committed by all sides. The point is that Sinn Féin alone continues to eulogise the perpetrators and to selectively remember the past while calling for an early Border poll.

And it does so while calling for “a shared culture of commemoration in Irish society North and South . . . based upon the principles of mutual respect, dignity and sensitivity”.

On Tuesday evening, Daniel Keohane withdrew his application.