More on Sinn Féin

by Michael Patrick O'Leary

This article appeared in Ceylon Today on March 5 2020

In my previous article I reported that the recent general election in the Republic Ireland saw Sinn Féin winning a majority of the popular vote. Because of the vagaries found in many democracies this did not automatically give them a place in government. Let us not forget that in the US presidential election in 2016, Hillary Clinton won three million more votes than Donald Trump. The loser of the popular vote won two out of the last five US presidential elections.

Sinn Féin did not run enough candidates in the general election to secure a majority of seats in the legislature. The nature of the Irish proportional representation system is such that the government is always a coalition. Today, we have the peculiar situation that because of various obstacles in the way of forming a coalition, the self-confessed loser of the election, Fine Gael’s leader Leo Varadkar, continues to serve as prime minister. Fine Gael finished third both in seats (35) and in first-preference votes. Fianna Fáil have 37 seats. Sinn Féin received the most first-preference votes, and won 37 seats. There has been much clamour to deny any chance of either of the main parties forming a coalition with Sinn Féin.

The leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, rules out any chance of his party going into government with Sinn Féin on moral grounds. He says that there has never been any contrition for the atrocities carried out by the Provisional IRA. “Sinn Féin’s justification for the IRA’s war is a continuing one… In the peace process we all had to make compromises in order to achieve the peace, but Sinn Féin need to come some distance too and they haven’t.”

Sinn Féin’s success in the election was because they attracted young people to whom the violence was not even a memory. According to 2017 data from the Central Statistics Office, Ireland has the highest number of young people in the EU and the second lowest number of old people. These young people are concerned about current issues like health, housing and homelessness rather than history.

Today’s Sinn Féin would have us believe that they have no links with the violence of the past. Part of the Provisional IRA army council strategy for making itself invisible has been to push media-friendly ladies like Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill to the fore. I have referred to this as a monstrous regiment of women; another commentator has used the term “skullduggery of skirts”.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said the IRA had “gone away” and that no one directs the party other than its membership or leadership. “The IRA will not be returning. The days of conflict are past.”. Many do not believe that. Garda (police of the republic) Commissioner Drew Harris said he agreed with a 2015 report by the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) assessment that the army council still oversees the IRA and Sinn Féin. Leo Varadkar has called on the Sinn Féin leader to disband the IRA Provisional Army Council.

Newton Emerson wrote in the Irish Times “It is tempting to say, only slightly facetiously, that southerners lack experience in the nuances of the peace process but will soon acquire the necessary sophistication.” Emerson argues that the intent of the 2015 report was to save the devolved Stormont government by asserting that a murder of a prominent republican in Belfast was not the work of the Provisional IRA. Two 2015 murders have not been solved and a murder attempt took place in the same area last month. Last November a new paramilitary monitoring panel reported without mentioning the Provisional IRA at all.

In Sri Lanka, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) was mainly dependent for funding in its early days on robberies and extortion. Trading in gold, laundering money and dealing in narcotics brought the LTTE substantial revenue to buy sophisticated weaponry. They also played a role in providing passports and other documents and also engaged in human trafficking. The Provisional IRA funded its terrorist activities with bank robberies and protection rackets. The IRA’s counterfeiting operations extended to fake football strips, designer clothes, power tools and a well-known brand of washing powder. A bottle of counterfeit perfume seized at a market was found to contain urine as a stabilizer. About half of Northern Ireland’s filling stations sold fuel smuggled from the Irish Republic, where duty was considerably lower, at a cost to the Treasury of about £200 million a year. Fuel smuggling, much of it organized by the notorious South Armagh brigade, was probably the IRA’s single largest source of income.

Martin McGuinness was the IRA Commandant for Derry. He and Gerry Adams were prominent in the labyrinthine negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement and the IRA laying down its arms. As a minister in the government of the statelet of Northern Ireland, McGuinness visited Sri Lanka to advise us on peace and reconciliation. Harris’s predecessor, Nóirín O’Sullivan, noted that the IRA remained heavily involved in organised crime in the Republic, with €28 million recovered from more than 50 individuals by the Criminal Assets Bureau. Like the LTTE, the Provisional IRA made a lot of money from dubious enterprises for its “noble” cause. Fiachra Gibbons, in the New Statesman, described Sinn Fein as “a kind of cross between Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church, but with extra guns, paedophiles and front businesses.” In 2005, the Department of Justice estimated the IRA’s global assets at €400 million. Where did that go? It has been privatised, with individual IRA members holding property portfolios and businesses in Ireland, Britain, Europe and the US.

The dissident groups are also into “ordinary” crime. The Real IRA is believed to be extorting millions of Euros from targeting drug dealers — as well as business people — in Dublin and Cork. The Real IRA have taken over many of the security and protection rackets once run by the Provos. The dissidents are also believed to be selling bombs to criminal gangs including elements within the Travelling Community.

It is understandable that the ‘respectable’ parties are anxious about allowing Sinn Féin into government, whatever the voters might want, and giving them access to the internal workings of the security of the state. Fintan O’Toole writes: “What Sinn Féin has to confront, sooner rather than later, is that it can’t continue to legitimise the “armed struggle” of the Provisional IRA without giving exactly the same legitimacy to every other gang that puts a different adjective before those three sacred letters: continuity, real, new. “

Padraig Colman