Fintan O’Toole, rummaging industriously through the moral attic of history, has emerged clutching the Spanish Civil War and waving it accusingly at modern Sinn Féin. In his telling, there is something faintly scandalous about the fact that a movement which once supported republicans fighting fascism in Spain now hesitates to vote billions into the welcoming arms of today’s military-industrial complex. To him, this looks like contradiction. To everyone else, it looks like the difference between 1936 and Tuesday afternoon.
The Spanish Civil War, as O’Toole reminds us, was a moment when idealists across Europe saw the struggle as a clear moral emergency. Fascism was advancing. Democracy was under direct assault. People picked sides, sometimes romantically, sometimes foolishly, often bravely. Irish republicans, like many others, sympathised with those resisting Franco. It was not complicated. There were villains, victims, and rifles. History loves nothing more than a rifle.
But O’Toole now appears puzzled that Sinn Féin, nearly ninety years later, does not greet every modern defence budget with the same trembling urgency. He seems to believe that sympathy for embattled republicans in Spain should logically lead to enthusiastic support for Lockheed Martin’s quarterly earnings.
This is less an argument than a time-travel error.
Modern Sinn Féin’s voters are not crouching behind barricades in Barcelona. They are standing in supermarket queues in Balbriggan. Their concerns are rent, childcare, hospital waiting lists, and whether their adult children will ever escape the spare bedroom. The military-industrial complex does not feature prominently in their daily anxieties, except as something expensive that happens elsewhere.
O’Toole’s confusion lies in mistaking historical sympathy for permanent militarism. Supporting people resisting fascism in the 1930s is not the same thing as writing large cheques to modern weapons contractors whose brochures feature tasteful fonts and phrases like “strategic capability enhancement.”
He seems faintly disappointed that Sinn Féin has failed to remain romantically militant across the decades. He wants the poetry without the prose, the barricade without the budget meeting.
But Sinn Féin, like every successful political party, has discovered a dull but essential truth: voters prefer housing to howitzers.
The real story here is not Sinn Féin’s inconsistency, but O’Toole’s. He remains emotionally stationed in a heroic past, while the party he observes has trudged onward into the unglamorous present.
History, to O’Toole, is still happening. To Sinn Féin, it already happened — and there’s a housing crisis to deal with before lunch.
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