Ó Broin Says Gerry Adams Should Apologise For Christmas Video

Matt Treacy ✒ on the call by Eoin O'Broin for Gerry Adams to apologise.

Waterford Local Radio has broadcast an interview with Dublin Mid-West Sinn Féin TD Eoin Ó Broin in which he suggests that it “might be helpful” if former party President Gerry Adams apologises for making a Christmas video which had been found to be offensive by families of victims. “It would have been better if it had not been made,” according to Ó Broin.

WLR introduced the interview by stating that the video had been withdrawn but it was still on the Ógra Shinn Féin Twitter feed this morning. How long before someone from Árd Oifig tells them to take it down?

The whole thing hangs on a kind of insider joke where the young Shinner turns to the camera, winks and says, “They haven’t gone away you know.” Which is a quote from Gerry Adams himself who used it to assure a heckler at a rally in Belfast in August 1995 who had demanded that he “bring back the IRA.”

Of course, the IRA was shortly afterwards put out to pasture in what amounted to a humiliating historical surrender and tearing up of its own constitution which committed it to remaining in existence until the achievement of a 32 county Republic. Recognising the northern state and administering it through Stormont would have been considered treachery with all of the penalties attendant upon that if you were a member of the IRA prior to 1998.

The video is not particularly funny. Adams has gotten in trouble for previous social media attempts at humour, but at least he has a sense of one, which is not a common ailment among some of the latter day po-faced puritans in Sinn Féin who are afflicted with deep sensitivity – about themselves obviously, and chosen victim groups, so all the more impervious to others.

When this is highlighted, they tend to panic, and we have seen other party representatives being hauled over the coals when their social media posts have been attacked by the sort of voter now attracted to Sinn Féin. Laois/Offaly TD Brian Stanley, and Dublin Bay South TD Chris Andrews, have previously been forced into humiliating apologies.

The bottom line of course for the carpet baggers and Machiavellian puppeteers in the background is power and the acquisition thereof. That is why people like Ó Broin and others are annoyed over the Adams video because it potentially interferes with their becoming ministers. Sin é.

What is interesting of course is that Ó Broin has the temerity to even suggest that someone of Adams’ stature ought to apologise. It will also perhaps cause some disquiet among the Machiavellian old boys who earlier in the year clashed, and apparently lost, in a head-to-head with Mary Lou over the demotion of Martina Anderson the Derry MEP.

Will Gerry apologise? Will the Boys of the Old Brigade persuade him that it is a good idea? Or will they tell “Mr. Know-it-all” – as he was described to me by a certain chap who would fit that bill – to get back in his box. They haven’t any intention of going anywhere, you know.

The vox pop on WLR, incidentally, would indicate that most people really do not see the video as an issue.

Another interesting part of the interview was where Ó Broin distanced himself from Sinn Féin councillors in Waterford who voted against the extension of a traveller accommodation site. This is not the first time that he has publicly criticised party councillors over their voting in line with popular sentiment on housing issues.

Which in fairness is to his credit, whether one agrees with him or not. And I mostly do not. It is all an interesting insight into the fragile coalition that post-revolutionary Sinn Féin is both in terms of elected representation and its voter base.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland.