As British As Finchley, As Dangerous As Dibley

Anthony McIntyre ☠ If Michelle O’Neill and Alex Maskey remotely resembled anything vaguely republican, then republicans would doubtless have cause to be embarrassed at them traipsing off to London from Britain’s northern Bantustan suitably attired to sit in deference at the feet of their king.

The day when either looked or behaved like republicans is so far back in the distant past that anyone below the age of 30 is unlikely to remember it. But as neither is any longer a republican, both having made the transition to pliant constitutional nationalism, their presence at a British royal coronation should not cause any embarrassment, much less rage, to republicans. They are merely doing what constitutional nationalists are expected to do – know their place in the pecking order on the British power grid.

While much personal bile has been levelled at them by critics on social media, there is little to be gained from ploughing that barren field. The bulk of the criticism tends to miss the point. They are not republicans betraying the cause, having long since moved away from republicanism. Their real transgression lies in their own fiction that they are republicans attending because they are leaders of everyone in the North who happen to respect that unionists value the monarchy. This conveniently overlooks that there are lots of things that unionists respect but which republicans would balk from giving credence to.

If Sinn Fein respect for the unionists was genuine rather than ersatz, instead of engaging in political gimmickry the party would tell them that its Siamese twin, the IRA, was responsible for the Kingsmill massacre. But it resiles from doing so because the discourse of respect is a fallacy, aimed at making Sinn Fein appear reasonable while making the unionists look unreasonable – the latter never too difficult to achieve at the best of times. Sinn Fein is all about shafting unionism not respecting it – not that there is much to complain about there: if anything needs shafting it is political unionism - and from that political-strategic perspective, victory to the banquet men is advantageous to the party.

Ironically, the real republicans in the vicinity of yesterday’s coronation were those English folk who were arrested outside it for protesting the monarchy. Liverpool, not Derry or Belfast, now forms the vanguard of anti-monarchist sentiment.

It is doubtful that O’Neill at any rate is an enthusiastic monarchist, even if she and the former mayor of Belfast were dining inside the royal marquee and not outside protesting with the republicans. To use a friend’s term, because Sinn Fein is 'gagging' for the type of government that will give it formal rather than real power, it feels compelled to play the game by the rules the current governments have prescribed. Were they republicans, in the week of his 42nd anniversary, they would have turned up at the coronation wearing Bobby Sands emblazoned T-shirts. But as his presence would have offended the monarchy, Sands had to be kept well away from the event. This time no one should expect the Adamsesque porkie about wearing the T-shirt beneath the outer garments.

Besides, as he was a blanket man and not a banquet man, Sands in all likelihood would have been appalled at his concealment beneath a tuxedo, his death from hunger in such contrast to stomachs filled with quail eggs and pink gin.

The political behaviour of Maskey and O’Neill has produced quite a lot of mirth at the magic of it all: how a once radical republican movement, by the wave of a wand to the sound of an English monarch mumbling abracadabra in Irish, became magically transformed into a deradicalised and constitutionalised project which poses as much threat to the British state in Ireland as the Church of England.

The first minister in waiting might as well be the Vicar Of Dibley.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.