You always know things are going pretty well for Sinn Féin when the commentators start reaching for wild comparisons and re-sketching the past as a disaster area for militant republicans.
One of the wildest comparisons I’ve heard recently was to compare the late Martin McGuinness with Princess Di. It makes the mind stretch and creak quite some, to compare one who led the committed life McGuinness did, as a combatant in the conflict and a reconciler in the peace period, with a woman who spent her days dining in swish London night spots, posing with some unfortunate developing world child, or draped across the deck of a luxury yacht with her latest flame.
But let’s try to be fair to the clown who drew the comparison, he appeared to have been thinking about the out-pouring of grief that follow the death of the princess and of the politician. In the case of Di, the massive wave of grief over her death was pretty astonishing, especially when you consider that her main contribution to society was to reveal that the heir to the throne was an adulterer.
Revisionist commentators have been redecorating the past for some time, of course, but in recent weeks it’s gone up a few notches. We’re told that the IRA was riddled with informers and the British security forces so completely in control, the IRA had no choice but to put their guns away and sue for peace. A version of the past which, if it were true, would set you wondering why the British bothered with negotiation and power-sharing and all the other tedious stuff. Why not march in and arrest the violent republicans, and revive Stormont as it was in the old days? You only negotiate with your enemies when you think they may be a threat. Curiouser and curiouser.
You’ll sometimes meet people who can’t understand why our past is given so much attention – shouldn’t we be future-focused? The reason is simple: if you can control the history of the past, you can control the future. That’s why the version of the past that declares the IRA was on its knees and ravaged by informers is so important to establish and is currently being pushed.
And don’t expect any slackening in this wall-to-wall repapering of the past. As for Princess Di, I remember her typically as giving either a sneaking-glance simper or a sneaking glance oh-poor me. Try as I may, I can’t get my imagination to show me McGuinness simpering or snivelling.
Am I missing something?
DE MORTUIS NIL NISI, erm, WHALE BONUM
The life of strife of d’ Princess of Wales
Justified the post-mortem rife with wails
In the yacht of Ari Onassis
Di and toyboys their asses
Had to park on tooled barstools of whales.
For the consumption of whom is this regurgitation of the past ? If it’s for their own English people…..I’ve never found them interested or ,and I say this guardedly , intelligent enough to fathom the complexities of the relationship between these isles. It’s surely not for the injestion of the American market …..Their Presidents and Statesmen were more than eager to be photographed with the ” Bold Fenian Men “, albeit surreptitiously to garner Irish votes….It’s not for Europe where England has now have reached pariah status. So what is afoot ?Is this some sort of subliminal indoctrination …..fixing a mindset for another dose of disinformation and perfidy….we won ,Hurrah we were the victors ,we never did anything wrong ,we’re not going to prosecute our murderers in uniform …..no files will ever see sunlight again…..we are still that beacon of light for savages to follow !
Why on earth would the British have wanted to restore Stormont as it was in the old days?
They would only have been creating further massive problems for themselves.
As for revisionism let’s just say there is a lot of it about.
Why not? They are unionists and it worked well for fifty years.
Fiosrach
It gave the ILLUSION that it worked well for 50 years.
By the time they found out what was actually going on and what a mess had developed it was too late, hence Maudling’s remark “Get me a large Scotch, what a bloody awful country!!!”
People like to portray the British overseers as some sort of eye of Sauron who looked on approvingly while the gentry ran the wee backwater.
I fail to see how this is possible, in the period from the end of WWII to ’69 the UK had the following things to consider:
Rebuilding the country.
Debt to America
The cold war
Decolonisation and the disintegration of the Empire in places such as India, the gold coast, Cyrenaica, Libya (partly), A-E Sudan, Cameroon, the Somali republic, Nigeria,Rhodesia, Basutoland……. Malaya and dear knows where else.
De-industrialisation
Wars all over the place
Suez
The establishment of the social security network and NHS
Post war housing
Re-dressing the country’s infrastructure e.g. building motorways and closing train lines.
Manoeuvring to join the EEC
Attempting a nuclear age
I doubt very much that the communication between London and Stormont consisted of little more than an occasional phone call from a Brooke of some sort and a distant relative also of aristocratic background.
No excuse for allowing unionism to run away with itself but to think that they wanted a Stormont of that ilk is highly doubtful when one looks at the circumstances in Britain itself.
Some good points there Am Ghob.It really was a very busy time , eh!
Why ,Giordanobruno, would Britain have wanted to restore Stormont …because they only ever observed the tragedy with cold Anglo-Saxon eyes. They prorogued that contemptible parliament in 1972 but within a year they were trying to re-establish it .They saw , in their eyes , a face-losing colonial uprising…..an immediate ,however irrational or illogically strung together sticking plaster was needed to divert the gaze of international eyes. Do you honestly believe that England acted then ,or is acting now in the best interest of the population here? Why have they never seriously, with mature heart, sat down ,thrown all the cards on the table and said …Lets find a permanent acceptable solution. In 2006 when Peter Brook uttered those infamous words ” no selfish strategic or economic interest ” he was lying through his molars. Britain has always a vested interest in everything it does ,counter insurgency training, spying ,removal of governments deemed unsuitable etc etc. However ,and I do believe this , they were ill prepared for the tenacity and tenaciousness of their new enemy , the IRA….an enemy that eventually fought them to the leather -bound negotiating table and opening an opportunity to progress politics here on our collective terms
Were Peter Brook’s words: ……. No selfish,strategic or economic interest…….. OR ……..no selfish strategic or economic interest …..? Makes a very big difference.
Eolach
Your last sentence is a nice example of the revisionism Jude has been talking about.
Tenacious and brutal you might have said.
You think the negotiating table could not have been reached a wee bit sooner with a lot less blood shed?
Eolach
See my answer to Fiosrach above, your answer is too self absorbed; they think of us as much as they’d think of Tristan Da Cunha.
Stormont II was an attempt to get the warring paddies to get together and run the place without killing each other and without the expense of soldiers in body bags.
And (as we’re on the topic of revisionism) the first soldiers that arrived from Britain were to tackle the unionist violence (remember that the first people killed by the British Army were Protestants) so establishing a wee colonial state with British citizens to be second class citizens is clearly absurd.
” In 2006 when Peter Brook uttered those infamous words ” no selfish strategic or economic interest ” he was lying through his molars.”
In which case it would surely be in the INTERESTS of the UK to make sure that the residents of NI had no cause for complaint i.e. the OPPOSITE of what Stormont did?
“However ,and I do believe this , they were ill prepared for the tenacity and tenaciousness of their new enemy , the IRA”
Probably because they never expected to have one because they were ignorant of what exactly was going on.
Did you ever consider that or are you one of these people who just believes that Westminster devoted all its time to annoying a very small group of people at the expense of post-WWII tumult?
Britain did not want to send soldiers over, in fact they warned against it.
They said clearly it is not sending them in, but getting them out again that would be the problem.
Control over Ireland to England is somewhere to use for ports in case their military antics require them, and ensuring no other more militaristic nations use Ireland to invade their own island.
Beyond that, they have little interest in the wellbeing of any Irish, unionists included and want to have as little to do with running this place as possible.
Thankfully britain is learning that the best way to protect their borders is through better relations with their neighbouring island and not controlling it.
Stormont also ensures peace and avoids repeats of the attacks on London such as canary wharf and Heathrow which is more important to them than the lives of squaddies and paddies.
an internal settlement in other words.
fiosrach
Really? In the ’90s?
Catch a grip.
Only for world and especially American opinion, they would have stamped out the uprising and re-established Stormont. It looked like they didn’t act quickly enough. What makes you think that they won’t try again? This mandatory cross community coalition business is only temporary until they can cobble something together without Sinn Fein. Everything that England does is for England’s good.
fiosrach
I agree, everything England does is for England’s good.
It would have done them no good to attempt, after 30 years of violent upheaval, to restore a government of one party rule here.
Utterly bonkers notion.
Softly softly catchee monkey. Not one party rule but one community rule.
The English government, with the help of our recent election results, see the writing on the wall for their beloved unionist majority, and realise there will soon be a nationalist/republican majority.
So, rather than dealing with an upbeat, confident Sinn Fein, they would rather intensify their psychological campaign, by making out that the Provos were a busted flush.
So the smear industry, with the help of the usual quislings, Eoghan Harris, Stephen Collins, Ruth Doddery Edwards et al, they will try to puncture the confidence of the SF leadership, which, hopefully, will be seen for what it is, and duly discredited.
Theresa May, always one to jump on a bandwagon, has today demanded an inquiry into who was responsible for the deadly chemical attack in Idlib, Syria.
But back home she has denied the Finucane family an inquiry into the British army/UVF murder of solicitor Pat.
Not much consistency of thought there, Theresa!
Giordanobruno ,yes undoubtedly that negotiating table could have been reached much much sooner.However, as in all situations of this kind, the British military hawks initial reaction is to bloody the ground ….they needed to teach those uppety natives an indelible lesson They began with a massacre in Ballymurphy in 1971 ,quickly followed by Bloody Sunday just 5 months later and no one can be naive enough not to acknowledge the premeditation in those actions …The Paras were deliberately and undoubtedly chosen for this task because of their wanton brutality .During the course of the war ,the IRA initiated several ceasefires , and I genuinely believe they were honest in their desire for a just peace. However ,because you can never underestimate the duplicitous and dishonourable motives of the Kitsonesque Englishman ,every opportunity was squandered in their quest for victory.. I could fill paragraph after paragraph with similar insights but the eventual outcome is….The English were the ones initially holding all the ace cards…..they were the legal authority charged with protecting ,not taking , lives. Their dirty grubby war of attrition cost us all dearly but all along they had the capacity and ability to halt the madness….why didn’t they?
Dr C
I can’t say I’m privy to this version of history other than from some of the more rabid unionists on Slugger.
My understanding is and always has been that the IRA couldn’t drive Britain out of Ireland by force and that the UK couldn’t completely defeat the IRA and the whole thing became pointless.
There were undoubtedly informers within the IRA but clearly not enough to bring them down.
Are there any proper academic history books that concur with this ‘revisionism’ or have you simply lifted remarks from a biased source?
That is key to the revisionism debate;
if we’re not questioning proper objective historians then we’re only questioning the opinions of certain individuals in the public sphere which means it’s not revisionism but rather a low level propaganda war of sorts.
And to me it seems that the majority of people or either Irish nationalist or Ulster-British nationalist hues are guilty of revisionism preferring to delude themselves that the Battle of the Boyne was solely a religious affair or that the British Army was chomping at the bit and started smashing Catholic skulls the very minute they came off of the first troop ferries.
We all know both of the above scenarios aren’t true but we all know people who speak like they are.
THAT is revisionism.
And if the comparison were not all that particularly wild, but instead, even by the admission of the author of this blog, “fair”, then the premise stated in the opening paragraph, and the description of “clown”, would both be in need of reconsideration.
What then of the comparison?
It is somewhat illustrative of Dr. Collins’s lack of knowledge of his neighbouring island, its people and Ireland’s British people that he fails to see, or dismisses so easily, the comparisons.
The immediate similarly (as he notes himself) relates to “the out-pouring of grief that follow the death of the princess and of the politician.”
The extended similarity relates to the, well described, “princess and politician”: both, ultimately Establishment ‘outsiders’ who kept company with the House of Windsor, but both with their own reasons for hesitancy in doing so.
And for each, in the days following their deaths and funerals, they became the focal point for a very 21st Century kind of grief: public, rather than private, and it might even be said that the first outpouring was the type of that which was to follow.
As for the misunderstanding of one’s British neighbours, Diana’s contribution to society was greater, much greater than the attempted slight. She was, after all, ‘The People’s Princess’, the darling of the liberal (republican) left, and the end of the ‘old’ Britain. Who can forget the *demand*, contrary to established practice, that the Union Flag be flown at half-mast from Buckingham Palace. That, if anything was as close to British Republicanism as we have come in recent years.
And oddly enough, the recent months, since the latter days of 2016, have brought us closer to the end of the old British Ulster – no doubt a welcome relief for many Irish Republicans.
So yes, things are going pretty well for Sinn Fein and the inexorable drift towards a United Ireland, but the comparisons aren’t all that wild, and, once in power, all establishments become pretty much the same.
Perhaps, though, the greater warning is this: whenever we choose to write our own histories, whomever we may be, we shouldn’t be surprised if everyone ends up with their own truths – truths which can never be reconciled.