Disappeared

By AM Sunday, January 24, 2010

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I didn’t go out to get this morning’s Sunday Tribune. My wife bought it in Belfast before it was scooped up by either the censors or the interested. So I will read it tonight when she returns or alternatively get it online. In parts of West Belfast it seems to have been going quickly enough. A journalist friend sent me a text message around 9am saying ‘Trib sold out.’ A friend in Louth also sent me a text saying Gerry Adams will be like Houdini if he manages to escape this time. The two texts combined suggest today’s story is another strong one. Probably why the paper is sold out in some places and read before the first coffee of the day is out of the pot.

I suppose it being sold out rather than blacked out is something to be welcomed. People can access it and then make their minds up rather than being told by the censors that they alone read it and have deemed it unfit for human consumption. Whether the Shinners have actually been grabbing it hot from the printing press or are victims of a wind up I don’t know. Neither would surprise me. With the party’s fondness for thought control it is so easy for the mind’s eye to visualise its members running around newsagents in the fashion that they come out with their paint brushes to daub over graffiti they don’t like. At the same time their incessant mendacity is a comedian’s wet dream so it is easy to caricature them.

While sitting in a relaxed state of amusement courtesy of the image of censors running through West Belfast grabbing papers by the armful, a comment came through to The Pensive Quill from yet another female former republican prisoner claiming that:

there is more than an element of truth in what the ex-prisoner told you about Sinn Fein censoring the Sunday Tribune. For the third week in a row we have been unable to purchase a copy of this paper anywhere on the Falls Road.

There is reason to be grateful that the paper rather than the journalist is all that has been disappeared. Same place, different time, things might just have turned out very different.

Whatever the reason for the disappearing paper the quality of its journalism is forging its way to all corners of the island leaving the mark of authenticity faster than any censor can blot it out. A spotlight is being thrust into the midst of some of the most sustained but shallow dissembling in any political party in the county. Its unremitting probing is now causing Sinn Fein no small measure of grief, casting it as the Billy Liar of Irish politics. The blunders Sinn Fein has made along its journey away from republicanism would never have acquired the same significance were it not for the manner in which its leaders have explained away those blunders in terms which nobody really believes.

With each new explanation sounder dafter than the last, it is becoming evident that the party of war is incapable of becoming the party of peace. Peaceful politics requires an acumen best not acquired on the battlefield. The strategic lies of war make an ill fit in conditions of peace. The Man of War can take his party no further. He needs to make way for the leader of peace.