This morning the Irish Times launches a double-barrelled blast at Sinn Féin in the form of two readers’ letters.  The first is from a Eugene O’Donovan who lives in London, the second is by Gareth Colgan who lives in Co Dublin. Both attack Sinn Féin president Mary McDonald for her tribute to former IRA man Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane.

O’Donovan wants to know “Why does the Sinn Féin leader oppose those who violate human rights in Gaza but openly supports someone who was convicted of mass murder in Ireland?”

This refers to an IRA attack on a Belfast pub believed to be frequented by the UVF. In the bomb and gun attack, five people were killed and McFarlane was arrested and given several life sentences in prison.

The second letter is shorter, and wonders why what Mary Lou McDonald regards as patriotism “I think of as barbarism?”

I don’t know if Mr O’Donovan or Mr Colgan lived in Belfast during the 1970s.  If they were, they would know that a war was raging there at the time, with mass arrests, torture and collusion, as a sectarian state finally began to crumble after fifty years of existing as a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’

Any death diminishes us all, and the deaths of Irish people strike home with particular force. Even the briefest of accounts of the Black and Tan war of the early 1920s tells us that there were many deaths inflicted by the IRA, just as there were in the 1970s. The men who fought and killed in the 1920s – Michael Collins, Dan Breen, Tom Barry – are honoured without question in the south of Ireland and beyond. A large oil painting of Michael Collins hung in the office of then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that Mr O’Donovan would hold Michael Collins in equal esteem.

Likewise Mr Colgan’s term of barbarism is, I feel safe in saying, not one which he would use for the actions of Michael Collins’s Squad on the morning of Bloody Sunday in 1920, or the attack on British forces by Tom Barry also in 1920.  Barry’s IRA unit killed 16 RIC Auxiliaries at Kilmichael,  Michael Collins’s Squad killed 14 British Secret Service agents.

Equally, I’m pretty certain Mr O’Donovan would have no hesitation in accepting Bloody Sunday 1920 and the Kilmichael ambush as acts of patriotism.

War anywhere any time involves brutality and death. Because of the courage shown by Irishmen fighting hugely superior forces, and the contrast in their subsequent lives, the Irish people salute and reverence these men. Except, of course, if they’re from north of the border, in which case they become barbaric and bring shame on any tribute paid to them.

Both O’Donovan and Colgan offer a double equation: Gaza and Belfast, patriotism and barbarism. It seems as though O’Donovan and Colgan prefer to follow the thinking of Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland :

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone’, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'”