Hey, what's this? There it was on page five of the Irish News (20 Oct. 04): Liam Kennedy is an "anti-republican". This was the response of an anonymous Sinn Féin spokesperson to a report I had given to a Save the Children seminar on the subject of vigilante-style attacks on children. The report, "Broken Bodies, Silenced Voices", had highlighted the role of both loyalist and republican paramilitaries in "punishment" shootings and gang beatings of children. Yet the reaction of Sinn Féin had been to shoot the messenger, as it were, thereby deflecting attention from the complicity of the republican and loyalist movements in the abuse of children.
But setting asides issues of denial and collusion, what on earth is an anti-republican? It sounds like a dismal, negative state; an offence to decency and nature. Some kind of anti-Christ? Perhaps there is a niche in Dante's Inferno for such crud-like beings.
As part of moving on, perhaps we should institute a truth commission, tasked with uncovering "anti-republicans" in our midst. There are good precedents. In the 1950s we had the McCarthyite house committee on UnAmerican Activities. And back in the USSR there were the people's courts on "anti-Soviet activity". Imagine the reality TV show: All rise: the court on anti-republican activity is now in session. Judge Adams in the chair.
It is time to confess, as the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm would have advised. I am an anti-provo-republican. I am not, however, an anti-republican. In fact, I favour a republican form of government. The Irish variant of republicanism that takes as its watchword the unity of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter has much to commend it. Of course a republican identity is but one of an array of identities I could summon up, and would hardly rank as basic to my sense of being.
More important is being from a rural community in Tipperary, being a fan of hurling (but definitely not Gaelic football), having an Irish and British sense of cultural identity (sporting the shamrock and the poppy, for example, though not usually on the same day, and sometimes not in the same place), identifying with the Irish and international labour movements, having a sneaking regard for poetry, and holding to no pope, no ayatollah and no god. What is really fundamental is a concern with human rights, democratic values and, above all, acknowledging the sacredness of the other, and indeed of all others, as members of the one human family. Being a unionist or a nationalist – though I can happily reconcile both identities – is in the ha'penny place by comparison.
This explains why I am led to oppose both provo republicanism and armed loyalism. As the loyalists haven't got round to pronouncing me an anti-loyalist yet – a bit slow on the uptake, I fear – I'll concentrate my remarks on provo republicanism. There are many obvious things one could say: there is the murderous history of the Provisionals as the main killing agency during the Troubles, a legacy its apologists invite us to forget; there is their continuing use of violence within working class communities in Northern Ireland, including attacks on children; and there is the racketeering, money laundering and financial corruption. The spectres of Jean McConville, Patsy Gillespie and more than a thousand others challenge the fantasy machine that tells us the Provisional's war was really a lark about equality and civil rights.
But I want to focus on other qualities of provo republicanism. There is its abysmal record in "defending" Catholic communities. Just think how many Catholics were murdered in the twenty five years before provo republicans took up defenderism and how many died violently, frequently at their hands, in the quarter century since the fateful events of 1969-70? Think also of the mixed communities in the sidestreets off the Shankill and the Falls, and in other parts of Belfast and Derry before the formation of the Provisionals and the Ulster Defence Association. Now we have "peace walls", venomous territorial politics, and two ethnic communities that are much more polarised spatially and politically than in 1969. A bit hard to square with a republicanism that spoke rhetorically of uniting Catholic and Protestant, one might think, though the outcomes are perfectly compatible with tribal politics.
There is the propensity to lie. It seems it is all right to tell porkies to those outside the movement. The infidels – the majority of the Irish people – don't count. The families of the "Disappeared" were strung along for years on lying accounts emanating from the republican movement. Provo republicans still dissemble about the links between IRA operations, profiteering and the remarkable financial strength of Sinn Féin. Mr Adams, M.P., as we know, was never in the IRA. Pigs don't fly but provisional porkies easily defy the laws of gravity.
We might put up with the mendacity a little more easily, if these flights of fancy gave rise to interesting and imaginative narratives. But they don't. Provo republicans seem to be congenitally boring and lacking in humour. Hands up who has ever listened to an interesting interview with an IRA member, turned Sinn Féin politician? Was there a single thought that stood out as not coming from the central mantra-making machine in Connolly House? Even the emotion seems simulated, as in a low-budget porno movie.
Thinking of the uncool, this year's dumbo prize for those with a humour deficit must surely go to Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness. Reacting to the fact that the Spanish police had detained at Playa De Las Americas the fugitive Belfast republican, Michael Rogan – suspected merely of murder – the former minister for education is reported as saying: many people would regard the arrest of Mr Rogan "in Spain, while on holiday (italics added), as vindictive and unnecessary".
They really would be funny ... well, that is, if they didn't have the guns. The same might be said of loyalists, who no doubt are equally deserving of Spanish holidays and a good sun tan before a court appearance. Still, when provo republicans and loyalists don't have guns anymore (tiochfaidh ar la?), then somewhere in my Chrismas tree of identities, I'll be happy to extinguish the ones marked "anti-provo-republican" and "anti-loyalist".
