You could be charitable and say they’re responding to newspaper policy, and would like to hold onto their jobs, thank you. The less charitable view is that they happily follow the neat black-and-white line, or even rejoice in so doing.
By way of illustration we have Kathy Sheridan in today’s Irish Times.
The great fear for many in the south is the increasing ‘respectability’ of Sinn Féin – a party no longer confined to ex-combatants and narrow-minded followers of a murderous tradition. Once the middle classes buy into something, the game’s over.
Kathy focuses on the announcement by Daniel Keohane (who, as it happens, I know) that he plans to join Sinn Féin. What alarms Kathy and others like her is that Daniel is a senior research fellow at Dublin City University and has a background in EU foreign, defence and security policy. Not your common or garden Shinner, then, Kathy figures.
She hurries on to comment on the commemoration of Thomas McElwee, the hunger striker, and the tributes paid to him. She notes that “Yvonne Dunlop, a 26-year-old mother of three, was burned alive when one of the firebombs destroyed Alley Katz, her parents’ little clothes shop where she worked”, and that McElwee was convicted of setting off the firebombs.
She goes on to quote unionist online reaction: “You’ll never reach my community until this is recognised as plain wrong . . . If Sinn Féin can’t stand over political violence and murder now, why does it glorify those who did it in the past?”
She then gets to, in her words, “the crux of the matter”. “The point of disagreement is not that atrocities in living memory were not committed by all sides. The point is that Sinn Féin alone continues to eulogise the perpetrators and to selectively remember the past while calling for an early Border poll.”
Oh dear. Selectively remember the past, is it? David Trimble is hailed for his concession that the northern state “was a cold house” for nationalists and republicans over fifty years. A cold house is a euphemism for systemic discrimination and gerrymander by the state over a fifty-year period which stunted thousands of Catholic lives. Unionists have a massive statue of a finger-pointing Edward Carson in front of Stormont buildings – Carson who vowed to use all means necessary to see that ‘Ulster’ stayed in the UK. Has Kathy heard of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation, which exists “for the purpose of “marking the sacrifice and honouring the achievements of the Royal Ulster Constabulary”? Has she travelled through Lisburn, where a large group sculpture hails the service and sacrifice of the Ulster Defence Regiment? And has she ever wondered why both these ‘security forces’ were dissolved?
Finally, for those who talk about how Thomas McElwee was responsible for the murder of Yvonne Dunlop: please check the meaning of words before you use them. The word murder describes the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. Premeditated means you planned the killing in advance. Where is the evidence that Thomas McElwee planned in advance to murder Yvonne Dunlop? And why was McElwee convicted of manslaughter and not murder?
Kathy concludes with the comforting statement “On Tuesday evening, Daniel Keohane withdrew his application (to join Sinn Féin)”.
While this endless diet of Shinner-bashing continues in the pages of the Irish Times and in other media organs, one of two things will happen. Either the populace of the south will retract their mistakes and withhold their vote from Sinn Féin at the next general election, or they will recognise selective condemnation for what it is, a form of propaganda, and confirm their confidence in Sinn Féin.
Comments are closed.