WITH the clanging inevitability of Morecambe and Wise repeats on the BBC at Christmas, Michelle O’Neill’s Remembrance Sunday gesture has been thrown back in her face by the unionist media and elected representatives.
At the end of last week, Mrs O’Neill attended a Co Derry commemoration event for three young IRA volunteers killed in a premature explosion in December 1971. Cue hand-wringing and performative horror from the usual cast intent on exhuming grief and anger from a distant past in order to garner clicks and likes, or in order to convince their electoral base that with a New Year looming there’ll be no Lundy-like sell-outs in the next 12 months – or indeed the 12 after that.
We’ve said it countless times before and it bears countless repeats: As long as certain people don’t accept the basic right of people to commemorate whoever they want to commemorate in a context that is either welcoming or tolerant, there will be no meaningful movement on the vexed issue of legacy. The dogged insistence of unionism on maintaining that the legality of an organisation confers legitimacy on its commemoration is a bitter joke against a historical background that shows legal entities across the world to have been the most brutal and murderous; but it is more than that. It is a handy tool for those who view progress towards a future of tolerance and equality as loss of face and political defeat.
We say this to those unionists of goodwill who were happy to see her at the Cenotaph in November but were genuinely discomfited at the sight of Michelle O’Neill commemorating the death of members of an illegal organisation dedicated to pulling down the state: Her gesture of reconciliation at Belfast City Hall would mean nothing if it was only part of a bargain which precludes her from commemorating republican dead.
We don’t ask anyone to join her in paying tribute or expressing admiration to volunteers from the republican community from which she springs, we ask only that people understand that if she turns her back on the republican dead her time as a leader of Ireland’s biggest nationalist/republican party is at an end. And if Sinn Féin as an organisation was to make a corporate decision to snub republican commemorations, its time as the eminent force in pro-unity politics is over. And the dreaded vacuum opens.
The act of commemorating the British army that Mrs O’Neill took part in is only important, only meaningful, if by doing it she brings with her the families of those who thought fighting the same army was the only route to ending the union. That day has passed. The IRA has expressed its commitment to a political accommodation by going away – and by going away with the indentifiable and provable certainty of 20 years of inactivity that the vast majority of non-republicans would never have believed possible.
A new start on legacy in the New Year can be made. But it requires people to be realistic, not judgmental.
