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Sinn Fein’s connections to the Provisional IRA are no secret and they have never attempted to deny that connection. Indeed many of its members and politicians are past members of the republican group, served jail time for their actions, and have spoken openly about their mindset and thinking behind their membership of that group. However, those same have people shifted their energy from being members of the IRA and military operations to being nationalist and republican politicians dedicated to peace with mandates as elected representatives for their communities and constituencies.
Some, like John Finucane MP, son of murdered Human Rights lawyer, Pat Finucane, garnered so much support that he ousted long-standing DUP MP Nigel Dodds from his seat. Yet John Finucane isn’t, nor has he ever been a member of the IRA, his father was never an IRA member but was painted as one by British military intelligence, falsely seeding the reason for his death at the hands of the UDA in collusion with the British security forces.
So, what is unionism’s fascination, or dare I say fixation on the term ‘Sinn Fein/IRA’? Why the strenuous efforts to remind loyalism of the connection between the two at every opportunity even though Sinn Fein is a democratic political party and the IRA are no longer armed and are concentrated on peaceful democratic means?
The simple answer is, control. Political control. Unionism and indeed loyalism regularly refers to the IRA as “violent republicanism” which taps into the unionist ‘siege mentality’ in so much as they and their culture are seen by themselves as always under attack by those damned republicans and nationalists. The ‘IRA’ part of the term gives the siege mentality that extra injection of heady unionism and regression to bygone days of being all powerful.
The one thing political unionism, grassroots unionism, and loyalism have in common is the hatred of the fact republicans fought back against the occupation of the North of Ireland, our own country, and with that fight came Sinn Fein and the IRA. With Sinn Fein now being part of the political scene in the North, it disarmed political unionism to an extent in so much as they could no longer call on Sinn Fein to put down arms and concentrate on solely political means, so it fell to the old “Sinn Fein/IRA” quip to remind loyalists that they “haven’t gone away you know”. The ‘Sinn Fein/IRA’ term is still to this day heard in Stormont and Westminster from the likes of the DUP and Jim Allister of the TUV to remind loyalists that political unionism are the only people to defend their culture and Britishness. This unwillingness to let the violent past connected to one party go, while the likes of Ian Paisley Senior, Paisleyism, and the UVF were seen as one and the same by British intelligence, and the Ulster Vanguard which both Peter Robinson and Ian Paisley Senior were members of is a huge problem in our politics. So why isn’t the DUP labelled ‘DUP/UVF’? Because nationalists and indeed the majority of republicans took the Good Friday Agreement seriously while it was seen by unionism as a way to sidestep direct rule.
In the latest intelligence report from MI5, it was stated that loyalist paramilitaries now have in excess of 12,500 terrorists at their disposal and continue to recruit. They are still armed, are in the business of drug dealing, extortion, prostitution, murder, money laundering, and fund raising…did I mention murder? While during the entirety of the troubles, over thirty years, the IRA was estimated to have had 10,000 volunteers. Those volunteers remaining have now committed to peaceful politics while loyalists paramilitaries, with which the DUP regularly meet to talk strategy, are still murdering mostly people within their own communities and carrying out shows of strength in plain sight of the PSNI…yet the old battle-cry is still “Sinn Fein/IRA”.
“Sinn Fein/IRA” seems to be one of the only battle-cries left for grass-roots unionism and the only reason that term is still a rallying cry is the sheer lack of political leadership from within unionism who from the start should have been pushing loyalism to accept the fact that Sinn Fein speaks for a majority of Irish nationalists in the North. Nationalists and republicans are more mature in their mindset of sharing Ireland, whereas unionism continues with an antiquated ‘Siege mentality’ which will lead them around in a vicious ever-decreasing circle.
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