Mullaghbawn

By AM Thursday, June 8, 2023

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Anthony McIntyre ☠ The anticipated appearance of the Sinn Fein North Belfast MP John Finucane at a commemorative event for dead IRA volunteers in South Armagh this weekend has both amplified and injected rancour into public and political discourse. 

First thoughts are that if Sinn Fein is serious about enticing the DUP back into the Power Splitting Executive, this is not the way to go about it. If on the other hand the objective is to harden the unionist party’s resolve to delay taking up office, bringing even more opprobrium down on its head, it might just have the intended effect.

The South Armagh Volunteers Commemoration is a yearly event stretching back over a decade but the appearance of John Finucane is the first occasion on which it seems to have brought this amount of public controversy, with large sections of unionism enraged. Nor is it sagacious to dismiss all of it as political posturing.

First minister kept waiting Michelle O’Neill has insisted that everybody has the right to commemorate their dead. True, but how necessary or prudent is it to have John Finucane billed as the main speaker at the event? If I read him correctly Finucane is not and has never been a war advocate, seeming more of an anti-war personality who has never tried to justify the IRA’s campaign. Others who were both war patrons and members of the IRA, and who are still in Sinn Fein, such as Gerry Adams or Gerry Kelly could easily step forward to address the event and have a much smaller target on their back for unionist ire to aim at than John Finucane.

Regardless of what people like me think of the IRA's war dead there is no need for John Finucane to feel compelled to wear the republican equivalent of the British poppy. I wholeheartedly agree that the IRA dead should be commemorated. I carried the coffin of Thomas Begley, so to feign the posture of some shrinking violet when it comes to these things is not going to happen. But I was part of the IRA’s armed campaign and agreed with it while it was being prosecuted. John Finucane was not. He joined Sinn Fein long after the IRA had called time on its war, when it had long ceased to be the republican party of unity by coercion and had morphed into the constitutional nationalist party of unity only by consent. He is under no obligation to justify the IRA campaign.

South Armagh produced some of the most capable of IRA operatives. Volunteers like Brendan Burns and Brendan Moley who died on active service, and Patrick O'Callaghan who died of natural causes. They were men who in the words of Bill Clinton were drawn into the rage of the time and who fought a war against British state terrorism. It is fitting that they should be commemorated and not cast aside as pariahs to suit the mindset of political unionism which has yet to come to terms with its own support of a state security apparatus that inflicted serious human rights abuses on northern nationalists. But let those who directed them speak glowingly of them rather than expose to opprobrium those who had no hand or part in the war, leaving them to deal with the accusation that they are trampling on the sensitivities of those damaged by the IRA's war.

The IRA in South Armagh severely punished the British Army's premier war crime regiment in 1979, inflicting massive casualties on it in what was perhaps the standout operation of the entire Provisional IRA campaign in Ireland. But the South Armagh IRA also inflicted the war crime of Kingsmill. 

When viewed through the prism of a community that experienced the horrors of that particular war crime inflicted on an unarmed civilian population the words of Kenny Donaldson cannot be dismissed as distraction politics.

John Finucane is a son whose father was wickedly murdered in front of him, he knows the searing pain of loss. How then can he stand and observe an event which eulogises individuals who also stole away husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and potentially wives, mothers, daughters and sisters?

Forget the agenda of political unionism, but Kenny Donaldson articulates how the unionist community genuinely see this event and John Finucane's participation in it. The appearance of the North Belfast MP could make a genuine difference if he was to state clearly and unambiguously that the Kingsmill massacre was a war crime that not only scarred the unionist community but also stained the republican constituency. A failure by Sinn Fein to use the occasion for the very purpose of apologising to the Kingsmill massacre victims will point to the conclusion that it turning up to the coronation of King Charles, although dressed up in the language of respect for all the people of the North, was not an act of reconciliation but a vote expansion exercise.  

John Finucane has accrued a considerable tranche of moral capital as a result of being the campaigning son of a solicitor slain in the most heinous of circumstances. Any stress test is likely to indicate that this capital is open to serious risk of erosion if he fails to distance himself from all acts of war and those who perpetrated them. 

The legacy of Pat Finucane, a victim of war, is much too important to have it compromised by party political considerations. There is absolutely no ignominy in his son assuming an anti-war position. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.