In Northern Ireland, there’s a common belief that the devolved government at Stormont is dysfunctional; that its ministers struggle to work together to provide coherent governance. Given the Executive’s history of failing to reform the province’s public sector, tackle its economic woes or update basic infrastructure, it is not an unfair perception.
Since devolution was restored in January, though, and in the teeth of a global pandemic, a slightly more nuanced picture of Northern Ireland’s political landscape has emerged. While four of the executive’s five parties are struggling fitfully but honestly to provide leadership, one party is showing less interest in working as part of the team.
I’m talking, of course, about Sinn Fein.
This week, the party was embroiled in a furore about a pension, due to be paid to victims of the Troubles, which it has vehemently opposed. Deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill previously blocked the scheme by refusing to nominate a Stormont department to administer payments.
Last Friday, the High Court ruled that her actions were deliberate and unlawful, with the result that the Department of Justice has now been charged with overseeing the scheme. This judgment drew an angry reaction from Sinn Fein’s representatives, including the convicted bomber, and now MLA for Foyle, Martina Anderson.
After it was revealed that the pension would cost £800 million, Ms. Anderson tweeted that this money would go, “mainly… to those who fought Britain’s dirty war in Ireland,” “mainly (to) those involved in collusion” and “mainly (to) British troops like Paras who murdered people.”
Her tweet caused outrage among victims of paramilitary groups, who will, ‘mainly’, be the pension’s beneficiaries. Indeed, it went too far even for Sinn Fein, and the next morning Anderson issued an apology, “for the hurt and offence caused to people… who suffered serious harm during the conflict here”.
This retraction might have been greeted with less cynicism if it hadn’t coincided with a barrage of new social media from the party, reiterating the claim that the pension will ‘discriminate, criminalise and exclude.’ Anderson’s inflammatory language was missing, but the message remained largely the same.
Sinn Fein objects to the pension’s eligibility criteria because they shut out terrorists who were injured ‘at their own hand’ while committing crimes. The Victims’ Payment Board can also refuse payments if a claimant has a relevant criminal conviction, more than 30 months in length, that makes him or her an ‘inappropriate’ recipient of the money. The board is asked to take into consideration whether the offence caused physical or psychological injury to another person, and whether the claimant shows “continuing disregard for the law”, when it makes its decision.
In practice, many former paramilitaries will still be eligible for the pension, if they are now law-abiding and did not incur their injury while committing a crime. The board is likely only to deem the most flagrant abuses ‘inappropriate’. But that will not satisfy Sinn Fein, because it wants to establish the idea that republican ‘combatants’ were forced to murder and maim only by the inhuman machinations of the British armed forces.
In everything it does, the party is motivated ultimately by its commitment to destroying Northern Ireland, and its ongoing campaign to distort history, so that the most ruthless terrorists are viewed as victims rather than victim-makers. The pandemic has exposed this fanaticism ever more starkly, because Sinn Fein thrives on acrimony and instability, rather than the reliable and coherent kind of government required in a crisis.
Weeks ago, when the disease was at its lowest ebb, Michelle O’Neill urged fellow ministers to consider quarantining travellers from Great Britain. An official from the Department of Health responded by emphasising that, “the possibility of a traveller from England bringing the virus to Northern Ireland is very low in terms of absolute risk”. The point of O’Neill’s intervention was not to protect public health, but to stoke anti-British prejudice and create divisions within the executive.
The party was trying to recover credibility, after its leadership breached lockdown rules en masse at the start of July during an IRA funeral. Before thousands of republicans thronged the streets of West Belfast, Sinn Fein posed as the most zealous proponent of Covid-19 restrictions. However, the party could not allow potential charges of hypocrisy to derail an opportunity to glorify the life of one of its most notorious henchmen, Bobby Storey. Its representatives fielded the criticism in their usual belligerent fashion; by displaying not a trace of contrition or shame and attacking their opponents as viciously as possible.
Sinn Fein’s strategy of exploiting the pandemic was established in its early weeks. According to the Irish Times, as Covid-19 struck Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill objected to a patient being airlifted to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on the basis that he should instead be taken to Dublin. The party initially tried to block the health minister’s request that the army help build a Nightingale hospital outside Lisburn. It attacked other executive parties hysterically, whenever Northern Ireland’s policy on the virus stayed closer to the rest of the UK than the Republic of Ireland.
This unseemly behaviour might at least cause some self-styled progressives to rethink their attitudes to the party. After Sinn Fein collapsed the executive in 2017, it used social issues to disguise its real reasons for refusing to share power. This emphasis on ‘rights’ and ‘equality’, including demands for same-sex marriage and abortion reform, led some young liberals in Northern Ireland’s political ‘centre-ground’ to assume that they were largely on the same side as the republican party, particularly as it adopted Europhilia after previously being a vicious critic of the EU. This feeling was encouraged by the DUP’s uncompromising stance on social issues.
Since power-sharing was restored, though, Sinn Fein’s antics have shown that it is not interested in the everyday work of running Northern Ireland properly. While there is plenty to object to in all the political options in the current Assembly, when it comes to providing people with stable government, jobs, and reliable services, one party consistently tries to undermine everyone else’s efforts.
The pandemic has shown clearly that, in Northern Ireland politics, it’s Sinn Fein vs. The Rest.
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