They could not see him:
being physically threatened, as he's only the tactical brushwork for his political masters' mouthpiece.
The supposed threat had emanated from a dispute over the erasure of a wall mural for republican prisoners in West Belfast. After reading the links that had been sent, I briefly responded:
I just don't get the sense that he was spoofing. Did he remove a mural to make way for the Palestine one?
We both agreed that Danny D, as he is widely known, was a ‘party man to the core’ and would drink whatever Kool-Aid was handed to him. No matter how sour or unpalatable, he would find a way to gulp it down to the very last drop. Yet it seemed difficult to believe that he had conjured the threat out of thin air. In the past, Sinn Fein has used the threat angle, even when there seemed to be none, in a bid to play the victim. It conveniently airbrushed from its own monochrome narrative the menacing house visits and sinister pickets its own members had been involved in as part of the intimidatory tactics it was inclined to use when seeking to suppress alternative perspectives in its haste to become part of the country's political establishment, north and south.
I felt I would write something about the bristles bagarre, but with holidays, other topics being covered, and the general flow of life pushing me into a different lane, nothing materialised. A former republican prisoner, who thought the threat to be extremely stupid and counterproductive - characterising it as 'very bullish without any ability to back it up' - asked me last week if I had penned anything. This was in response to a brace of pieces I had written on the evolving views of other erstwhile denizens of the H Blocks, Sean Lynch and Pat Sheehan - these days constitutional nationalists.
So here we are. My primary interest, like that of the former prisoner, is not about who is right over the details of the threat. Danny Devenny is believable. It is more about the way in which the incident underscores the inexorable drift away from any semblance of its radical past that Sinn Fein has undergone, in this case specifically in relation to Palestine.
The friend who first brought it do my attention didn’t paint the world of West Belfast mural writers in glowing colours. A sleaze mural covering the entire length of the International Wall would not be inappropriate but would be insufficient to capture all the detail. There were references to:
junkets to New York . . . plenty of perks put in their back pockets . . . The perks also included working on film sets that depicted Belfast . . . Casanova their way through many visitors. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah . . . an old boys club.
None of this was remotely directed towards Danny D, about whom it was said:
The murals were born to combat the state censorship of Nationalists, the "voice of the people." How ironic is it, then, that those same "people’s muralists" are now censoring the people. Danny was part of the SF stable of muralists . . . always set as the leader of the pack and Conway Mill his fiefdom. His halo has slipped . . .
Danny Devenny disputed this. 'The allegation that we are trying to censor another political group is complete nonsense.’ But given the party’s SLAPP policy which has been slapped down a number of times in both Irish and British courts, gagging others is standard fare for Sinn Fein, to whom Danny Devenny is unapologetically aligned.
Wondering if the charge of censorship was justified, I asked and looked around.
According to the Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association:
A large IRPWA board on Belfast's International Wall had been removed.
The International Wall is an Iconic part of Belfast's history situated on the Falls Road and attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year. The board that has been removed stated simply that Republican Prisoners still exist in 2024.
The IRPWA would never give permission for anything that highlights Republican Political Prisoners to be removed.
Whoever is playing games is playing with fire. We want to state this publicly - do not touch IRPWA boarding again.
The boards will be re-erected immediately.Victory To Republican Prisoners!
The tone of the statement containing what appeared to be an implied threat seemed reason enough to give credence to the Devenny claims of having been threatened. Even if the threat issued in his home - which he claims to have taken seriously - was most likely hot air, thrown out by people from a group renowned for its capacity to make nothing happen, there remained no justification for it. While the threat has since been lifted, according to the muralist, that it was ever issued in the first place is reprehensible. To boot, there seems something particularly ludicrous in threatening to shoot a man who has already been shot twice by the state and loyalists for his involvement in republican activism. Even though he has moved on from his republican politics - writing in the Financial Times in 2009, 'I seem to have gone from agitator to establishment figure' - that is hardly a reason for threatening to shoot him.
The IRPWA hit out at what it called:
erroneous and misinformed articles in local unionist rags and British-owned online media outlets regarding the removal of an Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association mural on Divis Street by members of Sinn Féin on Wednesday 19th June
Claiming to set the record straight the body said:
The omnipresent protocol is that sections of the wall are owned by either the muralist or organisation that has current portions of the wall from Northumberland Street right round to the IRPWA mural on Divis Street. Sections can be, and have been, loaned temporarily for a specific and agreed period of time or given permanently with prior permission.
This protocol is something Danny Devenny is fully aware of, as he has used it to prevent murals being completed previously. This includes occasions where he has refused to allow Republican Prisoner murals on sections of the wall that had been abandoned for periods of time. Most notably when the IRPWA whitewashed a section on Northumberland Street over a decade ago, only to return the next day to see Danny had started a completely new mural stating it was his wall . . .
He, and those who encouraged him, should have availed of well-established channels to seek approval to remove IRPWA property in the form of a mural highlighting that Republican Prisoners still exist. These channels remain open.
The person who initially flagged the matter up to TPQ insisted:
The theme for murals in the past was created by the Shinner think tanks, it was never about polling the local community. It was what was part of their topical agenda and another tool to combat state censorship. Local SF cummans could decide what went up in their area. Danny knew the arrangement with the other groups. The wall was a 'shared space', not his fiefdom. He had priors when it came to colonising the wall and censoring other Republicans.
Paul Maskey further added that the visitors to the Devenny home told him they 'have no interest in Palestine and that he must put their mural up, which is linked to the political group Saoradh.' Perhaps they did, given that it was a heated exchange in which tempers seem to have been running high.
Regardless of that conversation, the irony is that the group aligned to both the prisoners and the threat has demonstrated a more consistently positive attitude towards the Gaza crisis than Sinn Fein. It seems ludicrous to be standing on principle around a mural when the party abstained from a vote in Belfast City Hall on a proposal to call for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Ireland; snubbed appeals from the BDS movement and others not to join Genocide Joe’s Patrick’s Day junket in Washington; and evicted Palestinian protestors from one of its rallies where it was feting some bureaucrat from the oleaginous Palestine Authority.
Regardless of that conversation, the irony is that the group aligned to both the prisoners and the threat has demonstrated a more consistently positive attitude towards the Gaza crisis than Sinn Fein. It seems ludicrous to be standing on principle around a mural when the party abstained from a vote in Belfast City Hall on a proposal to call for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from Ireland; snubbed appeals from the BDS movement and others not to join Genocide Joe’s Patrick’s Day junket in Washington; and evicted Palestinian protestors from one of its rallies where it was feting some bureaucrat from the oleaginous Palestine Authority.
The threat against Danny Devenny was unconscionable. It belongs to a thuggish world and should never have been inherited from Sinn Fein by present day republicans. Yet, the mural should not be used as moral camouflage to mask and obscure Sinn Fein's willingness to shaft the Palestinians when they required much more than a mural as a demonstration of solidarity. As a measure of fidelity to the people in Gaza, the battle over the mural was Shinner subterfuge, the purpose of which was to monopolise control of the cultural message being projected from West Belfast.
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