Michael McDowell: a man of peace

You can tell there’s an election not too far away when you check the opinion columns in the Irish Times. I suspect the editor of that newspaper doesn’t have to press-gang columnists into writing anti-republican pieces, but they’d have to get up early in the morning to be there at the anti-republican barricade before Michael McDowell. Which is odd, because Michael is a failed politician ( remember the PDs, anyone?) and yet he doesn’t hesitate to address the South’s ills. I would say Michael has  habitually flushed features – no, more pink than scarlet, Virginia- because he’s indignant about the way things are going politically; but even when he was in the Dail leading the PDs, he looked equally flushed and indignant. If he were an Englishman, he’d probably get the adjective ‘gammon’ attached to him.

Anyway, today he’s properly pissed off because he figures Sinn Féin have too much money.  Naturally he says it in a more jeez-I’m-smart way: the heading of his column is ‘Sinn Féin is this island’s best resourced political party, the beneficiary of a legacy of barbarism’. Wow. That just sizzles with rage, doesn’t it?

He devotes much of the column to the IRA of 20 and more years ago. This could be called dropping the past on the present from a great height. He goes into some detail about the IRA’s development of weaponry, their escapades in Colombia. But since this is about money, he soon moves to “hijackings, robberies, kidnappings and, eventually in December 2004, the Northern Bank robbery, which yielded £26.5 million in cash.”

How Michael knows that the IRA were involved in all these things he doesn’t say. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. But it’s certainly the case that people are supposed to be deemed innocent until proved guilty – something you’d think a former Minister for Justice would know. But hey – that’s an election on the horizon.

He talks about how the late Rose Dugdale was key in developing weaponry, not just for the IRA, but for sale to people like Colombia’s Farc guerrillas. And of course Michael holds republicans responsible for any attacks that Farc and Co made using these weapons: “the human cost paid by the innocent victims …for the insatiable greed and political ambitions of the Provo movement in Ireland.”

See what I mean? People like Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill are really just benefiting from actions of the Farc and other guerrilla movements.

In fact, reading the article you’d conclude that Michael detested political violence of any kind. That’d be a mistake. Back in 2016, Michael was at pains to insist that his grandfather, Eoin McNeill, was as warlike as the next man. Or woman.

“His [Michael’s granda’s] views were that the Irish Volunteers should not contemplate insurrection in the context of their being hopelessly under-armed and under-prepared’’ 

Back in 2016, Michael  insisted that the Irish people had a moral right to use violence to end British colonisation – but it had to have a real chance of success.

So you see,  it’s not a question of morality at all, it appears. It’s more that  you must have plenty of weapons and be well-prepared when you attack British forces.  Oh, and have done it well back at the beginning of the twentieth century. That way, you can salute your granda and defend him from those who’d say he wasn’t really into political violence. Because he really really was. Honest.