| If
You Ask Me
by Alex
Kane
It is 25 years since Danny Morrison asked the question "Who here
will object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an armalite in the
other, we take power in Ireland?"
My goodness me, a
lot has happened since then. In exactly the same way that that excellent
actor Robert Lindsay has morphed from Wolfie Smith, delusional leader
of the Tooting Popular Front in the 1970s, into Ben Harper, head of the
thoroughly middle-class and entirely dysfunctional My Family -
so Gerry Adams has
morphed from the hard-edged voice of militant republicanism into a beardy
waffler, as credible and as scary as Nana Moon, Wolfie's one time prospective
mother-in-law, before she ended up gaga at the Queen Vic.
The long and winding
road from Karl Marx to Groucho Marx has seen Adams stand republicanism
upon its head, ditching every cherished principle along the way and now
reduced to posting the sheet music of A Nation Once Again to on-the-runs
across the world.
Time isn't on his
side. He is caught between a clock and an ard fheis, knowing that it is
only a matter of months before he has to ask the grassroots to decommission
the dreams along with the stockpiles.
Indeed, ard fheis's
will have to be summoned to vote on so many issues they may soon resemble
the Ulster Unionist Council.
There isn't going
to be a united Ireland and well he knows it. When it abandoned abstentionism
and took seats on both sides of the border, Sinn Fein itself legitimised
partition.
When P. O'Neill agreed
to the end of the armed struggle it was an admission that the IRA had
to be emasculated - arms first, everything else afterwards, was the grim
reality facing those volunteers still living in the shadows.
Sinn Fein is now gagging
at the bit to govern Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, while
former bombers and gunmen are queuing up to proclaim that a seat in the
Assembly or Dail is infinitely preferable to the ditches and safe houses
they had been used to.
Adams may persist
with the pretence that he is the spiritual and constitutional heir to
that faction of Sinn Fein which broke away in 1922, because it wouldn't
endorse or tolerate the 1921 Treaty.
But, in reality, he
has merely diluted Sinn Fein from bile green to vichy turquoise and turned
the ard fheis into a Darby O'Gill and the Little People convention.
He is no nearer now
to a united Ireland than Sinn Fein was in 1905, 1916, 1922, 1970 or even
April 1998. His day is never coming.
But he's been helped
enormously by the fact that too many unionists are blind to the tailspin
reality of his position.
Shortly after the
Belfast Agreement was signed, one commentator wrote that, "Unionists
are too stupid to realise that they've won the only battles that mattered
and republicans are too smart to admit they have lost."
Eight years on and
that remains the case; with the DUP acting as recruiting sergeant for
Adams' analysis and painting as bleak a picture as they can - all of which
helps Adams seem stronger and more effective than he actually is.
Yet the one tactic
that unionists haven't tried is that of calling Sinn Fein's bluff. Instead
of talking up the supposed gains, unionists might find it more useful
if they pointed out the sheer scale of Sinn Fein's retreat on key issues.
As Edgar Allen Poe noted: "Ghosts live on fear. But pull away the
sheet and you put away your fear." Maybe the DUP should change their
mantra to, "Ulster Says Poe".
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