The Irish Times beats the anti-Shinner drum (again)

One of the things we look for in a newspaper is consistency. It can’t one day be left-wing, the next right-wing. It can’t one day be  protesting about fossil fuels, the next calling for more turf-cutting. And it can’t be one day be putting the boot into the shadowy organisation called Sinn Féin and the next cuddling up to that party.

However, there is little cause for concern. The Irish Times  maintains a rock-like consistency in its detestation of Sinn Féin. Where it thinks it detects a chink in the SF armour, it aims its fire. This morning in an article by Gerard Howlin, it  is gleefully seizing on the recent riots in Dublin and giving the Shinners both barrels.

The article’s entitled ‘Some of those who were attracted to Sinn Féin’s paramilitary past are now veering far-right.’  It says the party “replayed its paramilitary past as a radical credential’. EH? I don’t remember any Sinn Féin politician, north or south,  using the ‘paramilitary past’ as a credential of any kind. Chapter and verse, please, Gerard? Ah. I see. Not available right now. Maybe that’s because at the time of the IRA ceasefire in 1994,  Mary Lou McDonald was 21 years old, Pearse Doherty was 13, Matt Carthy was 13 and Louise O’Reilly was 17. I know that charges of glorying in IRA actions were regularly fired at Gerry Adams when he was a TD, but that was some time ago.

Undeterred, Howlin argues that when Mary Lou McDonald called for the resignation of Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, “this was a mistake”. Especially calling for Harris’s step-down. Why? Because this “politicised the office”. Really? I would have thought the office was politicised the day Drew Harris, formerly of the RUC special branch and inextricably linked with MI5, stepped into the £250,000 job. And I don’t think politicians should have turned their faces away and plugged their earholes, when the rank and file gardaí voted 98% that they had no confidence in Harris.

As I say, the Irish Times is nothing if not consistent in its anti-republican stance. But in Howlin’s article it shows that the southern establishment is desperate to find an area where they can put a dent in Sinn Féin’s consistently sunny position in the opinion polls.The thing is, Gerard, everybody cares about law and order. Everybody is against stabbing innocent children. And everybody can see when a newspaper is happy to use a sickening tragedy as a political opportunity.