THE death and burial of Bik McFarlane was the signal for another round of unionist hand-wringing about death and memorialising. Bik was, we were told, the most heinous and evil IRA man since the last IRA man that died. Expressing solidarity with his family, acknowledging long years of friendship, remembering his role in the conflict – all of these things, we were further told, are a vile insult not only to victims of the IRA, but to the very concepts of peace and justice.

Your average unionist rep might never consider the scenario, but I invite them to consider what would happen if Sinn Féin did exactly what Loyal Ulster demands of them.

So people with a massive profile who knew Bik for years – in jail and out, socially or as comrades – say nothing in public. They may or may not pass on their condolences privately to the family, I’m not sure if that would be allowed or not in this putative protocol.

How do senior DUP and UUP figures think that would land with the republican community (not just the republican movement, the republican community)? What depths of anger and bitterness would a Sinn Féin refusal to publicly acknowledge Bik McFarlane engender? Does Loyal Ulster know? Does it care? Can it imagine? And what would that bitterness mean in terms of the remarkable peace process cohesion of the republican movement?

One thing we know for sure is that the media wouldn’t have ignored Bik McFarlane’s death. And what kind of headlines and broadcast debate does Loyal Ulster imagine that a Sinn Féin absence from the Bik McFarlane funeral would lead to?

‘Joy unconfined as Sinn Féin do the right thing’?

‘Tiny IRA funeral heralds a new era of hope’?

The truth is that there aren’t adjectives in the English language sufficiently sensational to describe the doom-laden lines by which a republican split would be announced. There aren’t words sufficiently gleeful to describe the way in which the media would greet the ending of the peace process.

I’m not naïve enough to think that there aren’t senior unionists who would be delighted by the biggest and most devastating fracture of republican unity since 1986; but I’m also optimistic enough to think that most unionists simply don’t understand what exactly a refutation of memorialisation by republicans would entail.

The IRA funerals are going to start coming thicker and faster. The youngest IRA volunteer to have fired a gun or transported a bomb is well into middle-age. Senior figures who still occupy prominent positions of influence and affection in republican public life are in their mid- and late-70s; in their 80s even. That guarantees a steady and imminent stream of IRA funerals, small, medium, big and huge. Is unionism really suggesting that it will continue to set out its stall of reactions from righteous indignation to spit-flecked fury at every cortege kerbside? 

Ultimately, though, Sinn Féin will go on paying tributes and carrying coffins not to stick a finger in the eye of the Brits or the unionists; not as another manifestation of ‘the struggle’. They will go on doing it as the funerals become ever more regular out of genuine respect; out of genuine admiration; out of genuine love. And sometimes – often – out of all three.

And as every human being who ever buried someone knows, that’s not something that is amenable to disapproval – performative or genuine.