For Sinn Féin supporters – and for supporters of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – there is only one question this morning: will the use to which the Paul Quinn case has been put derail the Sinn Féin express train?
Nobody can fault Sinn Féin’s opponents for not trying. Until last Monday, 95% of people in the south wouldn’t have known who Paul Quinn was. Thanks to Brian Dobson and Miriam O’Callaghan, by Monday of this week everybody knew. The case had become like a high-voltage electricity cable with wires laid bare: if you didn’t approach it the right way, you could be left for dead. Sinn Féin approached it with great caution and expressed full sympathy and apology to Quinn’s grieving mother.
In George Orwell’s bleak novel 1984, when the authorities wanted to remove some awkward fact, they simply removed all evidence of its existence and maintained that it had never existed. Said often enough, the public began to see it that way also.
In the handling of the Paul Quinn case, the same has occurred. Of course Paul Quinn’s death was savage and sickening. But what had been the official response at the time? The then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern ( Fianna Fail in case you’ve forgotten) declared that he had received reports from the gardaí and from the PSNI, and it was clearly seen as a drug-related feud in which Paul Quinn had somehow been caught up and beaten to death.
In the past week, have you heard any journalist mention these facts? So while the memory of Paul Quinn’s death has been resurrected and headlined, what the police on both sides of the border and what the Taoiseach of the day had said then was completely ignored. It might as well have been obliterated. If there ever was a failure of integrity by the mainstream media, this was it.
So the only question left now is, will this headlined horror, partially reported, be enough to stop the Sinn Féin express at the ballot box today? My guess is that most if not all those who planned to vote Sinn Féin will briefly consider the horrors of the story, will then look at their own lives in terms of housing and health, and will decide what’s happening to them every day right now far outweighs what happened and who said what thirteen years ago.
I don’t know if seismic plates make a sound when they shift, but if they do, you may well hear the sound of their grinding when the exit poll results are announced on RTÉ at ten o’clock tonight.
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