| If
You Ask Me
by Newton
Emerson
Because
anything that happens two years in a row is traditional, Thursday March
16 sees the traditional humiliation of Gerry Adams. Last year it was the
McCartney family who ruined his St Patrick’s Day. This year they’ve
been joined by the Rafferty family, also allegedly bereaved by an IRA
member and also unimpressed by the Sinn Fein leader’s commitment
to justice and equality for all.
It must
take Gerry back to that awkward moment in 1994, when he returned from
his first trip to the states to be met at Dublin Airport by protestors
shouting “murderer”. Mr Adams told reporters this meant we
were “entering the final stage of the conflict” – but
while that might have been true it wasn’t true in the way he imagined.
The
more ‘normal’ a politician Gerry Adams becomes, the less frightened
people are to bring their bereavement to his doorstep. The families of
those killed ‘by their own side’ have led the way, because
their grief can’t be slandered with accusations of sectarianism.
Worse still for Gerry, they’re using Sinn Fein’s own infrastructure
of victimhood.
The grass-roots
call for justice, the well thought-out media strategy, even the trip to
Washington itself - these are republican tactics, familiar to us all through
similar republican crusades. Why a movement with so many skeletons in
its own closet continues to dig up the dead is a genuine mystery. Perhaps
it shows how deeply republicans believe that all those Protestants they
killed basically deserved it.
But
of course the IRA didn’t just kill Protestants. It also killed more
Catholics, more southerners and more republicans than any other protagonist.
It even
managed to kill more of its own members than anyone else, albeit through
that particular form of collusion that Sinn Fein prefers to call informing,
and that it would also prefer the bereaved to forget. But the bereaved
don’t forget, for as long as they live, and many will outlive Gerry
Adams.
How
does he think he can ever escape them, any more than Britain can escape
the relatives of Bloody Sunday? Experience from other conflicts, especially
in South America, shows that the resilience of grief always, always overcomes
the persistence of a lie.
The
republican leadership needs to realise that the dead won’t just
haunt them in Washington. The dead will haunt them for the rest of their
lives.
If
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