Michael McDowell stands on some coffins

Michael McDowell is once more on the warpath against Sinn Féin in today’s Irish Times, because of their support for the change of the name’Herzog Park’ in Rathgar, Dublin. Mr McDowell figures the Shinners should not be speaking in favour of any such change because they named a park in Newry after Raymond McCreesh, one of the ten republicans to die on hunger-strike in 1981.

In support of his argument McDowell  cites Barry McElduff’s comic routine late at night in a shop where he had come to collect his daughter and a Protestant girl. McElduff, in his usual absurdist style, walked with a loaf on his head saying ‘Where do they keep the bread here?’ The video of this incident was shown again and again to prove that McElduff was engaged in sectarian gloating over the anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre where ten Protestant workers were lined up and shot. How? Because the loaf was marked ‘Kingsmill’.

I wonder if Mr McDowell has ever met Barry McElduff or been to Newry. If he had, I’d hope his insatiable appetite for attacks on all things republican might recede. Those who know McElduff, including unionists in the Mid-Ulster area, know perfectly well that McElduff is known for being devoid of sectarian tendencies of any kind. And I wonder if Mr McDowell has ever been to Newry and talked to locals about how they felt regarding McCreesh Park.  He also might want to dwell on the fact that the period December 1975-January 1976 was bespattered with bloody sectarian attacks on both sides – he hints at that, noting that the day before the Kingsmill massacre, three Reavy brothers were killed in their own home by the UDR-RUC-Loyalist Glenanne gang.

It always makes for uncomfortable viewing when a politician (or a failed politician like Mr McDowell) climbs on the coffins of the dead to denounce a political enemy. Besides, he’s talking about events  that happened over fifty years ago. If he’d gone back another fifty years or so, he’d have been dealing with the actions of the ‘Good Old IRA’, whose record was far more bloody than any in more recent times.

But of course we shouldn’t be talking about all that. We should be talking about Herzog Park, and whether local people have watched the mass slaughter of Gazans over a two-year period, not to mention the many killings between the establishment of Israel  and now. There’s an argument to be made for re-naming and for not re-naming,  but neither have to do with our Troubles. As McDowell knows full well.