John Cushnahan: a moral man

John Cushnahan, former Alliance Party leader and Fine Gael MEP, had a letter in the Irish Times.  In it he took Sinn Fein to task for criticising the Israel bombardment of Gaza which has led to the deaths of over 11,000 people, including women, children and infants. Not that John, a former Alliance Party leader and Fine Gael MEP, thinks that it’s OK for Israel to engage in obvious war crimes. No, John believes you need to reach a certain moral standard before you’re allowed to criticise Israel’s actions.

And Sinn Féin fail that test. Here’s John: “They [Sinn Féin] supported the three-decade-long campaign of the IRA and they still continue to glorify and justify the IRA campaign of terror”.  In other words, John believes the Shinners are not sufficiently clear of violence in their own past to criticise violence in others.

Well now. Most of the delegates at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis were either youngsters or not even born during the period of the Troubles. Is John saying people who  had no part in violence are to blame for the violence of others? As to their ‘glorifying and justifying the IRA campaign of terror”,  I’m going to guess that John was sufficiently awake to notice that there was an awful lot of action last weekend at cenotaphs throughout the UK.  These were honouring those men and women in the British armed forces who were killed while ‘serving’ – that is, preparing or aiming to kill other people For this it is customary for the British people to honour the ‘work’ of the British armed forces, from the First World War up to the present day. That covers all of the British armed forces’ actions during the Black and Tan war, during World War Two,  when hundreds of thousands of Germans died in British Air Force raids, the suppression of the Kenyan uprising in the 1950s which involved torture, castration and concentration camps for Kenyans the British armed forces didn’t like. And then during own Troubles, there was the Ballymurphy massacre,  Bloody Sunday in Derry and hundreds of cases where innocent Catholics were killed as loyalist gangs and the British armed forces colluded in these bloody events.

Honour, remember, glorify – the words cluster around the same central meaning of honouring the dead.

But John figures Sinn Féin have not ‘the moral authority’ to aim criticism at Israel’s brutality.

The party which John represented, Fine Gael,  was born out of the Treaty side in the Irish civil war. It was standard practice for Treaty forces to execute republican prisoners during the civil war, sometimes descending to barbarism as in Ballyseedy, where ten republican prisoners were strapped to a landmine which was then detonated.

And yet John isn’t at all embarrassed to assume the moral high ground so that he can look down on Sinn Féin support of Palestine.  A quiet word in your ear, John: if you’re going to take the high moral ground, first make sure that the ground under your feet is solid.