Moratorium?

By AM Monday, October 24, 2011

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It has been a tough presidential campaign for Martin McGuinness. He entered with a bang and despite giving it his best shot now seems destined to exit with a whimper. The decibels from the early days of his campaign could no longer drown out the questions that were being asked of him about an IRA past he suggested was mischievously manufactured.  The war in the North was probably less damaging to his prospects than its overspill into the South. A public prepared to waive its misgivings about the use of arms against British troops and cops in the North tended to frown when those targeted were Irish soldiers or guards. The confrontation with David Kelly in Athlone seemed to change the public mood. Since then McGuinness has found the going uphill and bogged down. 

Not for the first time has Sinn Fein found itself accused of trying to bunk into some political institution without coughing up the entrance fee. In the currency of any democratic society part of the coinage is scrutiny. In this country’s presidential election Sinn Fein through its irritable objections gives the impression of not wanting to pay.  Much of its response to critical questioning rings evasive, a diversion sign aimed at redirecting public attention toward some contrived fracas and away from the dispute at the toll booth. When the dust settled and the eyes returned the party was still seen as insisting on not wanting to pay for its ticket.

The upshot has been an image which shows that despite seven contenders vying for the trophy, one player alone thinks it, not the referee, may determine the position of the touchlines within which the contest shall take place, and that it may also adjudicate on when an attack is ruled offside. This works only if you get away with it. Fail to do so and you end up hearing the blown whistle each time you seek to make an advance.

The extent to which the peace process has corroded public intellectual life is flagged up by this. Too often free inquiry has been subverted by it, while the art of accuracy has lain prostate in front of it. In the North Peace Process was the ever ready siren that would race up behind any debate, blue lights flashing, demanding that discussion pull over to the side and give way to it. Similarly, in today’s discourse about the merits and demerits of the candidates’ suitability for the Aras, Peace Process blares its warning each time Martin McGuinness is posed a question he considers awkward, invariably about his IRA career.

Prior to setting out on this campaign Sinn Fein should have considered that one obstacle on the road to the Aras is the extent to which republicanism in general and the peace process in particular has failed to legitimise the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle in the minds of the Southern electorate. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of that campaign it is certainly not endowed with the weight of legitimacy afforded to the War of Independence. Double standards or not, it is what it is.

Against such a cultural milieu it would be a paradox were Martin McGuinness not to be asked IRA related questions. By denying his past he denudes his role in it of authenticity. By labelling as murderers many of those who were his colleagues and military subordinates, he casts a shadow of criminality over the IRA campaign he directed. For what else is murder but criminality? He has given full support to a police force that is allowed by the political terms he helped negotiate to investigate the past from an evidentiary perspective with a view to prosecuting individuals for any act carried out by the IRA during its campaign. In doing so he legitimises the British police investigation and delegitimizes what is being investigated. Through his delegitimizing and de-authenticating of the IRA past, he makes the case for more investigation of it by an agency he deems legitimate and authentic. If the PSNI has a right to ask questions of it why not the media?

Nor is the wider discussion one of the past alone. There remains the issue of the present in which McGuinness is perceived to be masking the past. The media genuinely and collectively believe that McGuinness had a senior IRA role in the past about which he is dissembling in the present. It would have absolutely no claim to a shred of credibility if it failed to pursue its beliefs. To acquiesce in a political narrative it strongly suspected as untrue would leave the media susceptible to the charge that it stood idly by while something ersatz but posing as the genuine article was smuggled past the electorate. Is this what any society wants from its media?

The Southern media has often proved inept in handling the powerful in Irish society. That major sections of it echoed Bertie Ahern’s advice to economist Morgan Kelly to commit suicide when he predicted the economic downturn is an indication of how poorly it has at times served the society on whose behalf it is supposed to scrutinize. 

In the light of such failings is society better served by a media that simply tails its politicians or by one that vigorously questions them? The past of Martin McGuinness might not be so terrible to those of us who share it and who do not see him as some Derry gangster who was involved in an aggregated crime wave. As this is a narrative held by a small minority on the island, it can hardly justify the call for a moratorium on discussion of that past particularly in the midst of an election when the public has a right to know what it is being offered.