| If
You Ask Me
by Alex
Kane
My. My.
Doesn’t time fly?
Can it really be 26
years since an excited, indeed triumphant Danny Morrison asked an ardfheis:
“Who, here, will object, if, with a ballot paper in one hand and
an armalite in the other, we seize power in this country?”
Yet, in three days
time, Gerry Adams will ask another ardfheis an entirely different question:
“Who, here, will support a British police service, British courts
and British justice, in return for sharing power with Ian Paisley in a
resurrected Stormont?”
And, oddest of all,
he will say it with a straight face - flanked by a sea of middle-aged
men who have grown tired of ditches, prisons and safe-houses and woken
up to the reality that unionists aren’t going to be frightened or
bullied out of their convictions.
Tiocfaidh ar la has
been chucked out the window. P O’Neill has morphed into a republican
version of Terence O’Neill.
The IRA has taken
the armalites, balaclavas and sheet music of A Nation Once Again and packed
them away in the thatch, along with the German rifles and pitchforks;
the rusted and seized-up relics of previous republican uprisings.
Morrison’s emerald-green
rhetoric of 1981 has been steadily diluted to a turquoise mumble. And
while Adams’ speech on Sunday may invoke the memories of hunger
strikers and an assortment of republican martyrs, it will require the
selling skills of a Del Boy Trotter to persuade the grassroots that he
really has got a bargain.
Partition remains
in place. Thirty years of IRA violence hasn’t budged, let alone
smudged the border. The ongoing British presence (along with a new MI5
centre) is accepted as a fact of life. And Sinn Fein needs Ian Paisley’s
imprimatur before it can set foot in an Executive Committee.
Let’s face it,
short of burning the tricolour and hoisting the union flag over Connolly
House, there isn’t much more that Sinn Fein could do to admit that
Northern Ireland, unionism and the present United Kingdom are here and
here to stay.
If Adams is able
to swing a majority of supposedly republican delegates behind a political
package which signals the end of the united Ireland dream for his generation
- and the next one as well (which is probably why Sinn Fein’s youth
wing have voted against it already) - then perhaps his chums in America
could swing a very late Oscar nomination for best actor.
A shared Ireland.
An agreed Ireland. A cross community Ireland. Call it what you will and
dress it up as you like - it isn’t a united Ireland. And deep down,
deep, deep, deep down, Gerry Adams is probably wondering where it all
went wrong.
If
You Ask Me Archive
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