Cherry-picking whose pain to cherish

If there’s one faith group I admire, it’s the Quakers. Not because they’re linked with childhood memories of porridge but because they were against violence. What’s great about that, you ask, Virginia – aren’t we all against violence? No, my dear, but the Quakers are different: they’re against all violence.

You can tell there are few Quakers among the serried ranks of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael – not to mention among the glitterati (I think that’s the word) of the Indo and the Irish Times. You know what I’m getting at by now, I’d say. It’s the killing of Brian Stack.

You’ve probably heard the story so many times recently you’d nearly rather forget it. But to sketch it briefly: Brian Stack was a prison officer shot dead by the IRA in 1983. A considerable number of prison officers were killed over the period of the Troubles but this one was a prison officer in the south. Having been contacted by the Stack family, Gerry Adams arranged for two of them to meet with a senior IRA figure who could tell them more about their father’s death. That apparently happened, the Stacks thanked Adams, and that was it.

Only it wasn’t. Now one of Brian Stack’s sons, Austin, is saying Gerry Adams must reveal the identity of the IRA man they met.

So far, perhaps, so predictable: no good deed goes unpunished, Gerry Adams’s efforts to bring closure to the Stack family has made him the centre of a fire-storm of criticism. He must reveal the name of the IRA man the Stacks met, he must reveal the name of the van-driver who took them to meet him, he must reveal the name of Brian Stack’s killer.

Fine Gael TD and Chief Whip Regina Doherty has listed six questions she insists Gerry Adams must answer. Here are six points that perhaps Regina might like to think about before she asks her next question.

1. Gerry Adams must have arranged the meeting with the senior IRA person on the understanding that he wouldn’t then go and tell the gardaí the name and address of that IRA person. Likewise, the members of the Stack family who were taken to meet the IRA man would undoubtedly have known that this was to happen under strict confidentiality terms. Had the Stacks not agreed to confidentiality, you may be sure the meeting wouldn’t have happened. Likewise Gerry Adams, if he had not given a guarantee, spoken or unspoken, that he would not reveal the name of the IRA man, the meeting would never have taken place. But it did, and the Stacks expressed their gratitude for the meeting.
2. For whatever reason, the Stacks now have decided that they’re not going to keep anything confidential. Gerry Adams’s reward for bringing the Stacks to meet with the IRA is that he is being attacked by Stack family members and by every politician in the south who detests Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams.
3. The Stack controversy in one sense at least is not original. Time and again over the decades, political opponents have been ruthless in using the grief of families who have suffered loss and pain during the Troubles. Jean McConville, the McCartney family, ex-Senator Maria Cahill – you can probably add to the list yourself. They have been embraced, their potential has been squeezed to the last drop, and when the squeezing was over and their usefulness completed, they were dumped.
4. The pain and loss suffered by the Stack family is, it goes without saying, keen and real. It should take nothing from their pain to note that hundreds, thousands of other families have suffered similar pain and loss. Regina Doherty didn’t say “Hell rub it up you” to Gerry Adams when he spoke of the pain and loss his own family have been subject to; but she does and did say that he had brought this pain and suffering on himself. So here’s the thing, Róisín. Would Sammy Devenney, who was in 1969 pursued into his home in William Street in Derry by the RUC, and there beaten so savagely he died some months later – would he pass the Regina test of not having brought it on himself? Or mother of eight Joan Connolly, who was shot in the back and then in the head in 1971 as she went to assist a young boy who’d also been shot by the Parachute regiment. The British soldier’s bullet blew away half Joan Connolly face so that her own husband was able to identify her body only by her hair colour. Would her family pass your test, Regina, of not having brought on her own suffering? We could go on with a list of literally thousands of grieving families about whom neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fail are indignant, just as they’re not particularly indignant about the thirty-three people killed in the Dublin/Monaghan bombings of 1974, or the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane as he sat down to dinner with his wife and family, or human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson, ripped apart by a bomb in her car. It is this selectiveness that sets my teeth on edge. One thing matters, it seems, to southern politicians: can we use the suffering of some family, any family as a soapbox from which to denounce Sinn Féin and its leader? If Yes, then let’s grapple them to our hearts with hoops of steel. If not, forget it, get lost, we’re busy.
5. Has the irony gene been surgically removed from every political party in the south? I was on RTÉ’s Prime Time a short while ago. Despite the fact that this whole affair was ignited by Fine Gael’s Arthur Farrell alleging in the Dail that two Sinn Féin TDs whom he named were implicated in Stack’s death, despite the fact that both Enda Kenny, leader of Fine Gael and Micheál Martin leader of Fianna Fail have been loud in their public interrogation of the president of a third political party, to wit Sinn Féin, and despite the fact that he himself is a politician, on the Prime Time programme, Fianna Fail TD Niall Collins insisted that “this has nothing to do with politics.” It’s hard not to think of Richard Nixon’s embittered “I am not a crook” statement on American TV.
6. Finally, if we’re to believe the Irish Times’s Miriam Lord, there was a bit of a hooley last week in Dublin’s Mansion House. It was organized by Fine Gael, the guest of honour was An Taoiseach Enda Kenny, the master of ceremonies was FG party chairman Martin Heydon, and “FG politicians past and present packed into the Round Room, where the first Dáil sat, for the show. “ This was a 1916 centenary show with much singing, the stars being Hildegarde Naughton and Ciarán Cannon singing“The Foggy Dew”. It was impressive, with one party colleague saying of Naughton “The hairs were standing on the back of my neck, she put Sinead O’Connor in the ha’penny place”. Among the lines that would have got the anonymous FG TD’s neck-hair rising would have been those addressed to Irish soldiers who died in British uniform during the First World War: “Oh had they died by Pearse’s side/Or fought with Cathal Brugha”.

No difficulty with men of violence there, then – honourable men of violence, men to whom statues are raised, unlike the bunch of cornerboys involved in our more recent Troubles.

Can you think of a more stomach-churning sight than a roomful of sanctimonious politicians? Answers on a post-card to Regina Doherty, c/o Leinster House, Dublin.