Of Micro Ministers and Mimic Men

By AM Friday, September 12, 2008

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Eirigi member Colm Duffy’s recent comments on gun and bomb attacks on the North’s British police force, while erroneously interpreted by the Irish News as support for an ongoing armed campaign, have nevertheless served to profile yet another fairly senior figure who has felt compelled to wander away from the Provisional movement in search of republicanism elsewhere.

Since the ceasefire of 1994 there have been many departures but, the formation of the Real IRA apart, they have always occurred in such a way as not to rupture the system Sinn Fein has in place for dealing with defections. In general Sinn Fein has managed its abandonment of all republican credentials sufficiently slowly to ensure that those who in turn have abandoned it did so slowly as well. It was more akin to the shedding of leaves than the breaking of branches. People, who drifted as individuals, would bob about like corks in the sea, but never gel as a serious alternative force. For the most part they were effectively marginalised, Sinn Fein always managing to maintain some republican fig leaf big enough to conceal its emasculation.

There are now many people who, like Duffy, held a high local profile within the Provisionals and who have now left the increasingly right wing establishment body. All who leave offer some republican rationale to justify their action and increasingly join a republican body. With each defection the Provisionals look less republican. If a republican image is gauged by the faces that populate an organisation then the defections amount to death by a thousand cuts for the republican image of the Provisionals.

This does not mean that the Provisionals face political or organisational meltdown. They are too firmly entrenched in the apparatuses and coffers of the British state to make that a serious likelihood. But they can do absolutely nothing to advance the cause of republicanism one iota. And with the departure of so many republicans, leaving the Provisionals to exude the appearance and tone of a right wing Catholic phalange, it is improbable that they will even bamboozle anybody outside their own unthinking ranks into believing that their current and future politics are republican in orientation. For sure there will be the annual Easter parades to cemeteries and the clench fist salutes, but only for the optics. A fist clenched around a wad of bank notes does little to conjure up imagery of revolution and insurrection. When the Provisional project has been steered by the Brits to a point where it can demand that unionists like Ian Paisley be in government and republicans like Michael McKevitt be in jail, even the fig leaf has been wrenched away. There is nothing left but micro ministers and mimic men giving out the same old same old as their predecessors.

Some sense of how the Brits have played the Provisionals can be found in the recollections of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff throughout his ten years as British prime minister. Although Powell affected considerable affinity with the Sinn Fein leadership, it was just that – affectation. He never quite managed to conceal his contempt for Sinn Fein celebrities, in particular Gerry Adams. And there is a sense that when he verbally dictated the British policy statement that he wanted read out by the Sinn Fein president at an ard fheis, he was squeezing Adams’ goolies just for the sheer hell of having the statement delivered in falsetto tones. We may be excused for suspecting that Powell might just have turned to Blair and said, ‘let’s see how many idiots applaud the bollix we are having this gofer read out for us.’ Even he must have been amazed when he found them all applauding. Fools and their politics are easily parted.

Sinn Fein will survive in the North because it abandoned what threatened that survival – republicanism. Those like Colm Duffy who want to resurrect it will readily discover that the grassroots applauders of every U turn were joint, albeit junior, partners with the leadership in the venture that produced the catastrophic failure of the republican side of the Provisional equation. An immutable law of republicanism in the North is that people are quicker to abandon rather than embrace it. The opposition now sprouting will a la Sisyphus labour only to discover the Yeats view that too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart. Sisyphus, forced back by the weight of that stone, is perpetually condemned to push it up the road to nowhere and see it roll back down over the graves of those that mark the Via Dolorosa.


First published in Fourthwrite, Summer 2008