POLITICAL unionism is a study in small man syndrome. You don’t even need to be male, but you do need a brass neck. Sometimes you wonder if they just do it to get some high off feeling righteous. Or are they just inherently bad mannered?
Current attempts by the unionist parties to 'both-sides' legacy investigation is a prime example of hypocrisy, sanctimony and purposeful aggression at work. Every time legacy legislation is mentioned, DUP, TUV and UUP representatives go off on some ramble about the Irish government’s audacity in taking the interstate case defending victims’ rights. They they spout some diatribe about the Irish state holding equal responsibility for the conflict as an actor.
Of course the claim holds zero credibility, but that’s never the point is it? Let’s interrogate it anyway. The British government holds the domestic and international legal obligations to investigate the vast, overwhelming number of killings and injuries which occurred under British jurisdiction – 97 per cent of the deaths. Irrespective of who carried them out, the British state has that obligation. Of the 3 per cent of the killings in the South (110), 62 were by loyalists, (including the 33 killed in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the biggest loss of life in a single conflict incident), killings that directly implicate the British state. The remaining 48 were by republicans and included members of the Gardaí, Irish army and inter-republican feuds.
As the British government has responsibility for legal and human rights investigatory compliance in the remaining 3.5 thousand deaths, you can see that both-siding any of the attempts to investigate the past bears little weight whatsoever. But these chest-thumping moments of deflection from the British government’s deliberate failures to deliver for victims by yodelling about Dublin are impervious to scrutiny.
There is also an attempt to pretend that the Irish state somehow 'colluded' with the IRA. Any republican who lived south of the border during this time could tell you how farcical such a statement is. Not only was the IRA not given 'safe haven' or 'free rein', the southern state had Gardaí with special powers, a state-run broadcaster with special censorship, judges sitting in special courts and a blanket denial of human rights to those citizens who took an interest in matters north of the border. That real and often hidden history is consistently denied and recensored.
In Stormont last week there was a day for victims of terrorism. The C word could have been used in the gathering, but was notably absent. Collusion between all of Britain’s political, military and policing structures throughout the conflict was responsible either directly or indirectly for the fuelling, arming and directing of all of the loyalist paramilitary groups. This year the British state’s sordid game of feeding IRA informants to other IRA informants in order to protect IRA informants began to be officially exposed. Yet somehow political unionism wants to frame 'terrorism' as belonging to the Irish Free State during the conflict. It is deflection, coupled with desperation, paired with insult to our intelligence, which culminates in denial of experience.
The Irish government is defending all victims of the conflict with its interstate legacy case which challenges Britain’s Legacy Act and attempts to self-indemnify and corrupt the Good Friday Agreement. It is not anti-British, it is pro-human rights. And if Little Man unionism was actually sincere, it would admit that.
