Even by the standards of Irish politics, it was the dumbest way to end a career, with a sliced pan on your head. Barry McElduff’s resignation was the only obvious ending.
Everyone in Sinn Féin knows that now, but like so many mistakes in their past, this was just another they had tried to defend and defend until words lost all meaning. It was hard to know which joke was worse, the sliced pan weighted with sinister symbolism or the one where he was suspended from a Westminster seat he doesn’t take.
The episode was a reminder that there remains many people in the North, like Alan Black the lone survivor of the Kingsmill massacre, who are still living with the Troubles every single day. Tiny blooms of pain interrupting his habitual hours such as a walk with the dog or a summer’s day. All while on the surface, Northern Ireland purports to be moving on from its past, one direct flight to Florida at a time.
Some of us who grew up on the Border have an ambivalence towards Sinn Féin that almost no one who lives anywhere south of Ulster can understand. We do not share their unconscious bias that has been forged through decades of a media mostly hostile to republicanism. The hostility has resulted in a much understated loathing in the Republic of everything to do with Northern Ireland.
Their cities, their accents, their “Irish” customs, not practised anywhere outside the six counties; their “British” customs, not observed elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
From the Border, we observe Sinn Féin from the perspective of neither insiders nor complete outsiders. We’ve had friends who joined while still in school, because the party was like a youth group, organising trad sessions, bus trips, rallies and craic.
The first time I ever saw the internet was on open day in Trinity College in 1998 when a student demonstrated Netscape Navigator by proudly loading Sinn Féin’s website. A youthful membership has always put them ahead of other parties in latching onto the next big thing.
We knew however that there were big players in the movement you didn’t talk about, even in your own home. Fearsome figures who clearly had more interest in enriching themselves than “getting the Brits out”.
No strong leanings
We knew that quiet farmers with no strong leanings would obediently buy An Phoblacht in the pub at the weekend but never read it. We knew a man who refused to buy it, who stayed up all night washing off a threat spray-painted on his milk shed wall afterwards.
The new breed of young, unadulterated Shinner, the Shinnennials if you will, pose a problem for elements of the media who had it easy attacking Gerry Adams
We also knew many ordinary, honest, decent, hardworking Sinn Féin supporters too. True believers, fully committed in their hearts that their objectives could only be reached through force of arms. They were wrong, but they were honestly wrong. Their experiences enduring the everyday prejudice and oppression of the British state are long forgotten and they’re practically forbidden from bringing it up any more.
Sinn Féin’s modern problem is a failure to pull apart their paradoxes. They know the media and the public down South focus on historic republican violence more than loyalist killings and British collusion. And that they’re the reason for the anomaly. The UVF and the British security forces aren’t running for election in the Republic, so their legacy of violence isn’t front page news quite like a Sinn Féin link.
The new breed of young, unadulterated Shinner, the Shinnennials if you will, pose a problem for elements of the media who had it easy attacking Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris.
They’re bright, talented representatives who are well-researched, articulate and undynastied. So instead they’re dismissed as “IRA apologists”. This gives Shinnennials a persecution complex they continually display without irony, often trying to use reminders of loyalist violence to defend a fresh outbreak of unpleasantness about republican murders. They resent being lambasted over a past they had no involvement with, but are happy to blame a new generation of Fianna Fáiler for the economic crash.
Level of secrecy is unrivalled
They want to be the party that talks about housing and tax and regular issues, but they’re holding themselves back with a failure to truly tackle a past that has infected the culture of their present.
It's not enough for Gerry Adams to go, he has to be proven to be gone through the way it conducts its affairs, most notably in not repeating fiascos like the McElduff bluff
Those bullying claims? The resignations? They’re too vast to ignore, yet they’re making a good fist of it. The level of mystery and secrecy is unrivalled in other parties. Part of that is to do with the distance and distrust between the media and Sinn Féin, but not all of it.
It was starkly apparent when a handful of its leadership emerged from a room a year ago with its new leader in Northern Ireland. They’ll go into a bigger room with all its members in a few weeks’ time and openly and democratically vote in a single-candidate election for party president, Soviet-style.
Mary Lou McDonald’s task is huge. To lead the party in a way that refutes the overwhelming sense, even among neutrals, that Sinn Féin is deeply controlled by a Belfast conclave. It’s not enough for Gerry Adams to go, he has to be proven to be gone through the way it conducts its affairs, most notably in not repeating fiascos like the McElduff bluff.
There is an undemocratic bias at play against Sinn Féin, but the party continually hands the tools of that bias to those perpetuating it against them. This old party full of young people has a lot of maturing to do. Sinn Féin needs to reach out to those who mistrust them for reasons they don’t understand. More than anything, they must find common purpose with those who mistrust them for reasons they do.
Oliver Callan is a writer, satirist and broadcaster