Fintan and Michael : the perfect tag-team

It is such a pity that Fintan O’Toole and Michael McDowell couldn’t have linked up when both were at their bodily peak. They’d have made a great wrestling tag-duo.

Yesterday Fintan vaulted into the ring and went ten rounds with Sinn Féin,  concluding his comparison of Sinn Féin with the Cathoic Church (at its worst, of course at its worst) by labelling Mary Lou McDonald as Cardinal McDonald. Today Michael McDowell has taken a sweaty Fintan’s place, bouncing into the conflict ring to keep thumping Sinn Féin, now that they appear to be on the ropes.

Eighteen months ago, Michael says, Sinn Féin were presumptuous, saw themselves as leading the next government. “It began to interact with financial, commercial and professional business organisations. Meetings were sought with the major legal and accountancy practices. TDs were directed to wear jackets, collars and ties.”

Can you imagine the chafing and rage of Pearse Doherty, who of course never wears a tie and collar, being forced to do so by the shadowy men in Belfast? These visits to big legal and accountancy organisations were, we were told  at the time, to reassure such bodies that Sinn Féin in government would not come and take away all their lovely lolly.

As for their famed housing policy, this, Michael claims, would involve the “State owning an ever-increasing proportion of Irish houses as ground landlord.” You see what Michael did there? He changed the only thought-through scheme to provide housing for desperate people into the Shinners owning more and more houses and more and more of the ground on which they’re built. What’s the good in having a house if you have to pay rent on it? And you don’t even own the ground on which it’s built. (Psst, Michael: it’s called ground rent and all sorts of big anonymous and yes, shadowy figures see to it that an annual amount is collected every year. You probably pay ground rent yourself, Michael. And have you heard that some vague landlord owns the lough-bed of Lough Neagh?

But Mr McDowell is only warming up with that. He has a clear, sharp-eyed vision of what SF are really up to:

“ It aspires to establish a 32-county socialist republic. And when it says socialist, it means far-left socialist. Its connections and sympathies with Farc, the Colombian Marxists, the Cuban government, ETA, the Basque Marxists and other world revolutionary movements as well as its far-left fellow Left group members in the European Parliament, all speak of a movement out of tune with the centre ground of Irish politics and thinking.”

How that raving loony leftist Pearse Doherty  ever got in the door of those big  financial and accounting houses I’ll never know. Wouldn’t they have freaked out at this rabid far lefty lot ?

But there’s worse:” Sinn Féin is not a conventional political party; it is a tightly controlled revolutionary movement still in the grip of a very small group, many of whom were active in the IRA’s campaign of violence”.

As for republicans having chosen the peaceful political path: don’t be daft, Michael warns us.  “Their leaders are not really leaders but more like glove puppets for unseen controllers.”

So now. Aren’t we lucky to have well-informed, smart men like Michael to tell us the painful truth that there are shadowy Belfast men pulling the strings of SF?

My one concern is that at no point does Michael tell us how he knows all this stuff? As a barrister, he must be aware that claims without evidence are no more use than balls of roasted snow. Odd that he forgot to include it in his article.

There are some people who would say Michael is a failed politician and that he still grinds his teeth at the memory of some Sinn Féin people singing “Cheerio, cheerio, cheeri -oooooh!”as he slunk from his final  failure at  the RDS counting centre.  But of course that’s hardly the case.  Like Fintan, Michael wants to create  a world where the republican species has been stamped on, beaten down, pulverised out of existence. And if that reminds you of anything happening on the world stage at the moment, you’ve probably made the right connection.

Still, it’d be fun to see Fintan and Michael, bare-chested both, lepping out of and into the ring, beads of sweat trickling down their manly forms, doing their best to save us and democracy.