This week should have seen Sinn Féin in the sunny uplit lands of opposition, to borrow a phrase from UK politics. Instead the party has dug a political and PR hole for itself and jumped in feet first. Despite the many attempts by SF representatives and supporters to justify the huge gathering at the Belfast funeral of Bobby Storey, the senior backroom figure in SF and the former Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army at the tail end of the northern conflict, the damage to the party’s reputation with the electorate north and south has been done.
Of course this is not the first time that the organisation’s own hubris and entitlement, borne out of decades of political isolation and persecution, has got it in trouble; but this has certainly been one of the more egregious examples of recent times. With a centre-right government in power nationally, and one quite possibly intent on ushering in a new era of neoliberal austerity in the wake of the first wave of the Covid-19 crisis, Mary Lou McDonald and company were well placed to claim the leadership of the Opposition in Dáil Éireann, putting other left-wing and centre-left parties in SF’s shadow. Not anymore. Or at least not until the deep memory of the voters begins to fade. And long before that we will likely be in the middle of the next Covid-19 wave when every utterance and criticism of government action by Sinn Féin in the winter months will be countered with reference to the Bobby Storey controversy by ministers and the conservative press.
To exacerbate matters the bizarre actions by the local SF cumann in the constituency of Dublin South-West and its nomination of the divisive figure of Paddy Holohan for the mayorship of South Dublin County Council is another party own goal. And though the Ard Chomhairle acted with speed, effectively suspending the organisation in the area, further damage has already been done to the SF’s battered standing.
While most readers will appreciate the pressure that was on the leadership of Sinn Féin and the wider (Provisional) Republican Movement in relation to the funeral of Bobby Storey most of us would also expect the party leadership to have resisted that pressure and to have abided by the restrictions that we as a nation have collectively agreed to. The failure to do so, and the apparent willingness to break the lockdown rules, is a reminder that some in the party still regard themselves as citizens of the Republic of We Ourselves Alone.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
You encapsulate the situation perfectly.
I am not a Sinn Fein supporter, but even I was deeply disappointed at the leadership’s decision (as well as shocked at the PR own goal, not to mention the possible health ramifications). As you rightly say, this is a party sharing government in the North and duty bound to provide effective opposition in the South, yet they squandered Christ knows how much political capital on what, in effect, was gesture politics.
Everyone can appreciate the pressure the leadership would have been under to attend the funeral, but that makes it all the more astounding that no one had the foresight, or was powerful enough, to point out not only the negative ramifications of attending but also the kudos to be had from NOT attending. A statement from SF paying tribute to Bobby Storey, pointing out why given the current health crisis the funeral could only be a quiet family affair, but pledging to properly honour his memory at a future date would have been more than sufficient. Everyone would now be talking about the responsible attitude of SF.
No one in SF can claim that they couldn’t have anticipated the shitstorm. There was a SF funeral in Belfast a few weeks back, which was another packed affair. Michelle O’Neill didn’t attend, and moved swiftly to issue a statement saying, “…everyone must abide by the rules” which took the sting out of it.
On a side note, 8 families were denied the right to attend the funeral of a loved one at Roselawn on the day of, and because of, Storey’s cremation. Imagine how those people must feel.
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“A statement from SF paying tribute to Bobby Storey, pointing out why given the current health crisis the funeral could only be a quiet family affair, but pledging to properly honour his memory at a future date would have been more than sufficient.”
100%!
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Yer both dead right here.
I just want to highlight the fact that they didn’t take this obvious solution. SF are no dummies, I cannot believe they did not think of the consequences or how to mitigate them.
So I suspect there was pressure to do this. Something had to happen to overcome the objections to the obvious political problems it would cause. So what is that pressure? Why the need to show all the faces of the past and present at the passing of a legend in the movement? Is there something going on below the surface I am ignorant of?
Or perhaps it was just affection, and emotion overruled their heads.
Hubris, machinations? What do you think is going on?
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Good question, gendjinn.
We can only guess, of course, but I can’t help wondering (and no stronger than wondering) if this was all deliberate. SF are good at PR, and must have been well-aware that this would not be a 24-hour news item and then forgotten about. Ignoring the overlaps in the following broad descriptions, did “militarists” overrule “politicos” in some sort of wing-clipping exercise? But if so, to what end? I really doubt that this was the case.
I can’t see it being an attempt to bring down the Northern executive. That makes no sense at this juncture.
Was it a “we haven’t gone away, you know” message to the lunatic fringe of republicanism, some of whom may be threatening to get out of hand in a few areas? This is possible, I suppose. Maybe the calculation being that a message had to be sent and the political hit was unavoidable.
Was it old revolutionaries trying to say, “don’t worry, we haven’t become mainstream”? I doubt they would reckon the political cost to be worth such daft gesture.
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Right? Could of course be a blunder, based on emotions but I lean towards trying to figure out what it was they purchased with that move. Especially with the marching season approaching.
SF wouldn’t be purposefully ratcheting up tensions, looking to provoke an over-reaction from the DUP?
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Possibly, but I can’t see what the benefits of provoking an over-reaction from the DUP would be, unless SF are ultimately looking to collapse the executive. But they’ve only just helped establish the executive, on the basis that to be seen in government in the North helps get them votes in the South. And it’s not even as if there’s any more votes to be had in the North from tweaking the DUP’s tail.
Let’s not forget, not only was this a PR disaster for SF, there’s no doubt it will also cost them votes. It’s not as if it were only unionist families that played by the rules, and as a result couldn’t get to the funerals of their loved ones. There were plenty of republican families, too. This will be a hard one for them to forgive and forget as well.
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Story is taking an interesting turn. Seems the opportunists exaggerated SF’s offenses.
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“To exacerbate matters the bizarre actions by the local Sinn Féin cumann in the constituency of Dublin South-West and its nomination of the divisive figure of Paddy Holohan.”
And as for this guy, at the outset he should have been bounced out of SF permanently, no matter how many votes he gets.
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I tend to agree. I’m not one for cancel culture, far from it, but I’m still remain unclear on where he stands on some of the controversial remarks he has offered in the past. We all make errors, especially when talking rather than choosing a considered word in writing. Verbal traps await us all in our day to day conversations. But sometimes they can be revealing of hidden thoughts. Or not so hidden. Though I will flip it and say that genuine working class voices in politics are few and far between. We urgently need to expand the breadth of our elected representatives, giving homegrown representation to communities largely ignored or sidelined. Maybe this is part of the teething problems of that process? Helping communities find better or more nuanced ways of articulating their views and concerns. I’m not sure. But yeah, his candidacy was ridiculous given his recent history. Some time to prove himself not the person he initially presented himself as in the controversies would have been the smart move.
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Here’s a good piece by Billy Bragg on the so-called cancel culture:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/10/free-speech-young-people
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I’ve long supported Sinn Fein and they generally have my vote (I went through a Fine Gael wobble about ten years ago which is bizarre even to me, though in my defense, I was also in and out of mental hospital at the time ) but I won’t join them. Things like this to me show the pitfalls of overenthusiastic embrace of any single political party.
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I agree. I’m an SF voter. But I also vote Left down the ballot. And if I saw a better local candidate than the SF one, that candidate would get my first preference vote. And has done so in the past. PR gives us the ability to support multiple parties/candidates and not to be identified singularly as a supporter of Party A or Party B or Party C.
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Yep, same here. Long gone are the days when I stuck with any particular party – though on the flip side there are some I would never vote for, no matter the candidate. I actually voted SF in the last Westminster election, not that it made any difference.
To take this a bit further, I have to admit the older I get the more I’m inclined towards the view of the US Founding fathers, most specifically Madison and Hamilton, in their opposition to “political factions” (ie political parties).
Compromise is of course a necessary and honourable thing within politics (and indeed within life). Where would we be without our politicians being able to compromise? But within a political party this is taken to the extreme, where a member, particularly an elected member, often has to suppress core beliefs in order to survive never mind advance. I quite like the idea of like-minded independents coming together on various issues, but with each individual always retaining the absolute right to vote whatever way she or he pleases. Getting elected as an independent in the first instance is another thing altogether.
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I agree!
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SF another FF in the making wearing the fig leaf of Republicanism , no wonder May Lou was quite on the drink driving scandal of Cowan the utter ignorance and contempt shown to people who could not attend funerals during this pandemic.
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How far it’s still true as the party takes part in active politics and the old guard ages and dies I don’t know, but for most of its history SF didn’t just regard themselves as “citizens of the Republic of We Ourselves Alone” but as the legitimate government of the whole of Ireland.
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The hard sciences are fortunate in having absolutes against which to measure and compare everything they do – hogwash is a lot harder to publish and is way harder to get away with. The humanities are not so fortunate: many disciplines have abandoned moral absolutes and intellectual rigour – and in many cases basic honesty. Worst of all is the appetite to always have something novel for the media and budget committees.
It was George Orwell in his 1946 essay – Politics and the English Language who put it thus:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
The largely self-anointed intellectual classes of the 19th century were deeply shaken by contemporary social developments. The French Revolution of 1789 greatly disturbed those in Europe holding positions of influence, power, and wealth. What the French Revolution demonstrated was that you weren’t necessarily safe even if you were a King: you could still end up in prison or worse with your head chopped off.
The ruling orders began to be aware that those whose lives they directed were rapidly growing in power and influence. What was worse they were being taught to read: and this was deeply alarming – who could say what ideas they might pick up? A revolution in France was bad enough – but what if it spread? A widespread and deep-seated fear of the common man began to percolate through the intelligentsia: a fear which has hybridised and spread through to the 20th century and into the 21st century.
The ever-expanding mass media of today has enabled powerful forces to evolve an anti-popular and anti-democratic cultural mode that can reprocess all existing culture and take it out of the reach of the majority. This mode is variously called ‘post-structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’ and it began in the 1960s with the work of Jacques Derrida. It has evolved a language that is impenetrable – and much of it is gibberish. The whole wretched business was exposed by the US physicist Alan Sokal.
Sokal submitted a convincing but completely nonsensical academic paper entitled:
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”
After it was published Sokal revealed that the article was a hoax: arguing that the political left and the social sciences would be better served by analysis based on reason.
Social Science is rotten with this stuff and for examples you are spoilt for choice – the first of the following publications is gibberish and the second was discovered to be based on non-existent data and had to be retracted.
Not for all the tea in China: Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance-Arousing Situations (Nam et al, 2013)
When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality (Science 2014)
The peer-reviewers who are supposed to vet these things are willing to give a free pass to any thesis which accords with the liberal narrative. Over the course a decade Prof. Diederik Stapel published at least 55 papers on topics such as how easily whites/men can be prompted to discriminate against blacks/women. When exposed as a fraud for fabricating and manipulating data for his research, Stapel explained that he was merely giving social scientists what they were ‘waiting for’.
Words are sprayed out like slurry from a muck-spreader: “Aspirational” “Irish Values/American Values/British Values” “Cultural” “Community” “Ethnic” “Equality” “Fairness” “Nativist” “Populist.”
All have exact and specific meanings but have been so abused as to become meaningless platitudes – they can mean anything you want them to mean.
All this has given the impression of motherhood and apple pie but the principal aim is to acquire control over people that language gives.
The move for independence from the EU by the UK was a truly “bottom up” revolution and also deeply shocked the establishment and the invective thrown by politicians and press at the section of the demos held responsible was astonishing: I made a word analysis of it and the parallels with the invective aimed at the suffragettes in the late 19th century is marked: they are exactly the same in spirit and sometimes the partisans involved use exactly the same form of words that were aimed at the suffragettes.
In the 19th century ordinary people were described as “the masses,” a de-humanising term, and were feared by many because it was thought that they would behave like crowds: in that they would be “extremely suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and capable only of thinking in images” – in short just how they regarded women. The process of civilising women was incidentally, considered by intellectuals of the time to be one of extreme difficulty. Exactly the same invective aimed at those advocating independence.
Those campaigning in the UK to remain in the EU really do think that their intelligence and sensibilities are greater than those of Everyman.
It does not seem to cross their minds that democracy relies on the simple fact that the Colonel’s Lady and Rosie O’Grady both have a very good idea where their self-interest lies. And in terms of self-interest the Colonel’s Lady has always thought it unwise to upset Rosie O’Grady and Rosie O’Grady has always been well aware of the dangers of alienating the Colonel’s Lady.
They really do believe that democracy is some sort of confidence trick and that the “masses” are just that: some sort of inert lump to be manipulated by sight of hand and rhetoric, whilst serious people like themselves get on with the serious business of organising the world to their advantage. Seriously.
They really do believe that the broad-spectrum of humanity are at best children in need of guidance and at worst murderous savages.
You see how the thinking goes? I am not one of the masses. I am someone special. I am an intellectual – one of the elite. Therefore my emotional responses, quite obviously are far more sensitive and subtle than those of my cleaning lady.
Going back to Orwell I think it has gone further than insincerity – discourse in politics, journalism and academe has been so corrupted by corrupt language that they have lost the ability to think clearly. They believe they are opinion formers but nobody is listening – it is a dialogue of the deaf.
You may not think that the abandonment of the Christian basis of western society is of any importance – which is what it is. ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem’ snarled Tertullian; the answer is a great deal. Christianity recognises implicitly that individualism is hard-wired into western societies by the Christian concept of the infinite value of the individual soul. Buttressed by Roman Law it became the great reforming force of western civilisation and it is notable by its absence, in the other great cultures; those of Islam, Hindu India, and China. It also has a very good idea of what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God.
In the grand abstract terms of the Enlightenment, the legitimacy of government derives from the consent of the governed, and therefore no government should have the right to hand over its authority to some external body which is not democratically accountable to its own people. So when the framers of the EU arranged for the nations of Europe to do exactly that, they were repudiating two centuries of political struggle for the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens and of governance “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
An attempt to re-boot the cultures of Ireland, the UK and the countries of Europe is being undertaken to prepare them psychologically for something else – Pope Leo V has told us so. But this scam is underpinned by an intellectually incoherent welter of wholesale bullshit and like all other frauds it will end in tears
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I dislike the postmoderns too, but I think the advertising industry (propaganda) has more to do with the vaccuousness of public language than Derrida. As for Christian Europe -yes, but the form that Tertullian supported would never have become the religion of the Roman Empire. Most literate Romans were Pagan monotheists well before Constantine’s conversion. Europe’s intellectual heritage was and is resolutely Pagan. Had Julian not got himself killed in Asia we would now most probably have a profoundly developed Paganism which would share many of the features of Hinduism. Indeed, much of the Platonic philosophy has distinctly similar conceptual depths as the sublime theologies of the Indian sages. I’ve nothing against Christianity, but at the same time I recognize that it is Europe’s Pagan heritage that is it’s undergirding. Actually, Egypt was more of an influence on Europe. than the Near East
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I totally disagree that hard sciences lack their own share of bad actors, dishonest publications, and more. One case I can think of was somebody trying to prove an herbicide didn’t harm a certain frog by using test plots where the animals simply wouldn’t go.
As for the EU….The officials are elected by people in the member countries. So the debate about the EU isn’t well served by saying there’s no consent from the people of the member nations. By your reasoning almost every
Democratic Federal State on the planet a sham, as people directly elect both State/Province officials as well as national ones.
Pope Leo V? Has he been speaking to you from the grave then?
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“…hogwash is a lot harder to publish and is way harder to get away with.”
Depends upon whether or not the scientists are in somebody’s pocket. For years we were told by scientists that tobacco did little or no harm to humans, turned out the evidence was in the opposite direction and the scientists were in the pocket of the tobacco industry. Same with the current prescription opioid crisis in the US, where addiction and death is off the scale. Turns out he scientists who were pushing these “harmless painkillers” were/are in the pockets of the big pharmaceuticals.
“Going back to Orwell I think it has gone further than insincerity – discourse in politics, journalism and academe has been so corrupted by corrupt language that they have lost the ability to think clearly.”
I largely agree with this. Nowadays, it seems, the more of a bullshit artist someone is the more seriously they’ll be taken.
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De Grasse Tyson’s Cosmos has a great episode on this very issue.
It was not scientists telling you tobacco was harmless. It was scientists employed by tobacco that told you that.
The same happened with lead previously. Again later with BPA in plastics. Same with man made climate change.
Don’t forget everything you know about these things being harmful was discovered and reported by scientists in the first place. It is news papers, TV, journalists and industrial payola that then muddy the waters and confuse the public. The scientist that tried to warn the world about lead, look up what happened to him. It was scientists in ICRF London that discovered the carcinogenic role of BPA in plastics in 1991, there was a documentary on ITV in 1992. And fierce industrial opposition for almost two decades to doing anything about it.
The opoid epidemic is a different one, there really weren’t scientists saying this was ok. It was corruption of the civil institutions, FDA and federal govt that caused, fed and maintained the crisis. US govt was just fine with these people dying off. No different from the indifference of the Reagan administration to AIDS.
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“It was not scientists telling you tobacco was harmless. It was scientists employed by tobacco that told you that.”
That’s why I said this: “Depends upon whether or not the scientists are in somebody’s pocket.”
And this: “… turned out the evidence was in the opposite direction and the scientists were in the pocket of the tobacco industry.”
Of course I meant the scientists telling us that tobacco was not cancer-causIng.
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“The opoid epidemic is a different one, there really weren’t scientists saying this was ok.”
I was thinking in particular of the scientists who worked for the big pharma companies, and who developed the opioids. They certainly said they were okay, and assured doctors and others that they were okay. And God knows how many scientists (and multiple others, including some doctors) not directly in the employ of big pharma who were paid to say they were okay, and to keep saying they were okay.
I did qualify everything in my original contribution with this: “… it depends upon whether or not the scientists are in someone’s pocket”.
I am not anti-scientist, far from it. I am anti-being-in-someone’s-pocket, no matter what the profession.
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Sometimes perfectly honest scientist who are in nobody’s pocket get bad results, just due to human error and assumption they might not have realized were wrong-or even that they had them. Not all cultural blindspots are as related to anything pernicious either.
With opioids that was arguably more over-correction than anything dodgy. For along time medical professionals were accused of not taking pain seriously enough and overrating the fear of creating addicts. However, when the rules loosened we got the epidemic. Actually Federal and local officials once they realized the severity took it very seriously. However, once you have a severe epidemic of addicts and networks to supply them it’s not that simple to solve.
As for Reagan and AIDS you are simply wrong. While Reagan was a social conservative and not that hot on many, many issues, the fact is that he never vetoed any funding for AIDS related research and education. When Congress passed bills funding AIDS research and or various education and prevention programs he pretty much signed them all without much question. When several Federal officials such as then Surgeon General C Everett Koop and his Secretary of Health and Human Services took proactive measures on HIV/AIDS that were pretty controversial among even liberal Democrats but especially among Republican at the time including mailing a booklet explaining HIV/AIDS, how it spreads and how to avoid it to nearly every household, Reagan never interfered or got rid of them (even though many Republicans wanted him to).
Also when the FDA worked to get drugs to AIDS patients faster and the CDC got involved Reagan didn’t in any way try to stop them.
Part of this was because Reagan tended to delegate a lot of work to people he thought had good judgement. Still even doing that meant resisting some pressure from his own party to get rid of a lot of people like Koop or Henkler.
I’m not a fan of Reagan. However, why you think the AIDS pandemic could have been stopped in the 1980’s but Reagan prevented that is very puzzling. HIV had been spreading in the US for at least 10 years by the time Reagan become President (during his early years they weren’t sure was AIDS even was), and the virus had been spreading in much of the world decades longer. How could the President of the US have stopped all that?
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“Sometimes perfectly honest scientist who are in nobody’s pocket get bad results, just due to human error and assumption they might not have realized were wrong-or even that they had them.”
And who on earth said anything different? That’s like pointing out “not all white people are racists”. We know that, for Christ’s sake. It’s the ones that are racist we’re worried about. Same as we’re worried about scientists and others upon whose expertise we depend being in the pockets of economic and/or political interests.
But I should have realised that your initial declaration was just the preface to yet another “don’t you dare blame the US on anything” diatribe.
What followed is just excuse-making nonsense, not only does it seek to let big pharma off the hook but also those who happily and knowingly peddled their myths for big bucks – from scientists down to salespeople. Instead of automatically going into defence mode at the first perceived slight on the US, try watching a decent documentary on the opioid crisis.
I don’t know enough about Reagan and the AIDS crisis to comment.
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Grace gets her information on AIDS/HIV from wikipedia It’s why she believes Bob Gallo had anything to do with discovering HIV. Best to ignore her on this topic, you will get no sense and a lot of misinformation.
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Well societies have struggled with drugs epidemics for centuries. It’s not always a big money making scheme in ANY country. And yes, in the late 80’s and early 90’s there were a lot of professionals and patients- often dealing with people who had very, very painful conditions that honestly believed the rules for prescribing opioids were too restrictive. These were oncologists, people who treated organ transplant patients or people with very painful bone or neurological disorders.
Many of them honestly believed that the current establishment didn’t understand that this wasn’t just a broken arm or a tonsillectomy and that the risk of creating addicts by giving them opioids had been blown wildly out of proportion. What nobody could have predict was the consequences of loosening the rules.
Most of the people who became part of the opioid epidemic did start with significant injury or illness.
As for HIV/AIDS. I remember some of that. Nobody had any clear answers on what to do about this mysterious disease really in any country where it existed and the general population was aware of the fact. People of all political orientations and walks of life all over the world were scared to death. While some in every community dismissed at as {fill in blank} and no threat to themselves or most people, the majority were probably quite afraid of it.
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Sorry, but we’re not talking about the poor people suffering pain (and even less about the world history of addiction) but about those people who knowingly exploited that pain for their own financial benefit. People like the Sackler family, and the professionals who were in their pocket.
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Again, a lot of people have assigned the Sackler family and people who were “in their pocket” much more importance in the opioid epidemic than they actually warrant.
What gets too easily dismissed or glossed over is the degree to which honest professionals acting in good faith made mistake, and the mistakes had very grave consequences. It’s not fun to acknowledge such a thing. People look at the opioid epidemic and say “Well, we can blame this on the greed of big pharma.” It’s a lot more unnerving to think that hundreds of entirely honest professionals were wrong. They seriously underestimated the risk of addiction when they argued that the then (80’s and 90’s) conventional wisdom regarding the risk of addiction from opioids was just wildly over-inflated. They were wrong despite having argued all that in good faith.
Then there are trickier relatives. Some of the alternatives to prescribing more opioids are cheap and simple, but others involve physical therapy, nerve blocks and other items that could cost the health system a great deal more money. Also there are questions about Narcan. It definitely has saved lives, but some fear it may be normalizing addiction in its own right. What are the answers? I don’t know what the solutions are at this point.
However, I do know that all drug epidemics in any society at any time are a lot more complicated than some simple little narrative whether it blames the drug companies or whether it blames low church attendance and working mothers.
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“Again, a lot of people have assigned the Sackler family and people who were “in their pocket” much more importance in the opioid epidemic than they actually warrant.”
Ha, ha, ha next you’ll be telling us that Donald Trump is terribly misunderstood, that actually he’s a well-meaning cuddly old bear; that in reality there’s very little racism in America; and gun control is a bad idea because it’s people not guns that kill people. 😂
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A heads-up to anyone interested in US politics (and we all should be!). Take a look on Twitter at the anti-Trump videos The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln is turning out. They’re excellent.
The Lincoln Project is a group on anti-Trump Republicans, by the way.
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And ASF liked this? Heh.
Please neither of you, ever comment on US politics again. It is quite clear you don’t pay much attention and rarely look behind the curtain.
LOL. Imagine being so gullible and clueless about US politics as to fall for the ghouls behind this project?
LMAO.
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You’re being nasty and irrational again. Maybe time for more counselling?
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I am quite disappointed at the nature of much of the commentary but most of all at the failure to note perhaps the most significant deliberate step of SF recently: to abstain from voting against the renewal of the Offences Against the State Act. This party is so intent on appearing to be a safe pair of hands for the State (ie the State of the neocolonial Gombeens) that its act has become fact.
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