Presidential debate goes south with ‘West Brit’ jibes

BEING saddled with the slogan “West Brits Out” was not the best start to Martin McGuinness’s presidential push.

But his rebuke against so-called West Brit criticisms of him was nonetheless a minor, but telling slip-up, revealing a defensive mind-set still tuned into the past.

Dictionaries summarise “West Brit” as a pejorative term of political abuse in Ireland, usually deployed against Protestants or those who are seen as too pro-British.

In that context, the Sinn Féin candidate was wrong, as a large section of people in the Republic are not alarmed at the thought of McGuinness becoming President because they are pro-British; they are alarmed because they are anti-terrorism and they define him as a former terrorist.

McGuinness and his supporters would define him as a “freedom fighter”, but it will be impossible to have any kind of substantive debate on which definition is correct, or, at any rate, more applicable, when we are only given partial knowledge of what exactly he did, or did not do, in the IRA.

Ed Moloney’s ever re-readable The Secret History of the IRA vividly conveys the disquieting fact that in the Bogside, and other Catholic ghettos, in 1969-1970, the Provisional IRA was seen by many mainstream nationalists as their only protection in the face of house-burning loyalist mobs, the rigid apartheid mentality of the Stormont government and the impotent indifference of its counterpart in the Republic.

Few people in Derry believe McGuinness’s story that he left the IRA in 1974. The local humour notes that would make him the one person to quit the Provos after the Bloody Sunday massacre in the city by the Parachute Regiment, which sent recruitment to the republican movement into overdrive.

McGuinness has never explained why he supposedly quit the IRA, or why, if that did happen, he would continue to hold such a dominant influence over the organisation for the following 37 years.

It is as risible as Gerry Adams claiming he was never a member of the Provos, let alone on its army council.

This lack of logic was caught out brilliantly on a teenage discussion show when, after Adams eulogised the IRA at length, a youngster asked him: “If you admired the people in the IRA so much, Mr Adams, why did you never join them?”

McGuinness played a major and pivotal role in the peace process, especially in keeping the more hard-line Republican elements “west of the Bann” on board. But before you can make peace, you have to make war, and that is the side of McGuinness’s history we know so little about.

Obviously, with Adams and other IRA suspects and prisoners tortured in detention and jail by the British authorities, membership was not something to shout about at the time.

But if the war is really over and the IRA has finally gone away, you know, then it is hardly likely McGuinness would face arrest for admitting he stayed in the proscribed organisation after 1974.

And self-made comparisons with Éamon de Valera as President are also spurious in the extreme.

Though de Valera generally liked to keep his hands clean, we know when they got dirty — well, apart from the murkiness of his role in the Treaty negotiations and controversy raging over the repeated claims of involvement in the Collins assassination. But, as far as his pre-July 1921 role in the armed uprising against British rule, we are pretty clear what he was up to.

Also, de Valera’s IRA gained the overwhelming support of the electorate in the 1918 election for their actions.

Provisional Sinn Féin, later Sinn Féin, only ever received a minority of the vote in one part of the island when the Provisional IRA was active — and active, of course, means killing people, usually civilians.

McGuinness says he has never killed anyone, nor ordered a killing — and it shows just how much his entry has altered the dynamics of the race when you try to imagine Dana or Michael D Higgins being asked whether there are any suspicious deaths or disappearances they would like to confess too.

It was a strategically brilliant move by Sinn Féin to run McGuinness, as opposed to the previously touted candidate Michelle Gildernew, who, though having the benefit of being a “clean skin” with no “active service” baggage holding her down, is a nobody in the south.

The presidency is not the primary target of the operation; rather, the party sees this as a transformative election that will finally legitimise Sinn Féin as a mainstream party in the eyes of southern voters.

Sinn Féin aims to marginalise a weakened Fianna Fáil in the same way it ruthlessly dispatched the SDLP in the North.

It hopes to carry the substantial bulk of strongly Republic FF support, and the disproportionate youth vote, McGuinness will get on October 27 through to the local elections in 2014 and on to the next Dáil showdown in the rebellion centenary year of 2016.

But due to the fragmentation of the field, it is quite possible for McGuinness to slip through the rankings and end up in the Áras — which is why transparency about his past is so important.

The likely inclusion of David Norris on the ballot paper throws the election into further unpredictability, as he would vie with Michael D for the mantle of the “Stop McGuinness Candidate” as Fine Gael’s lacklustre Gay Mitchell is far too right-wing and fond of quasi-religious rhetoric to be transfer-friendly enough to best a surging Sinn Féin.

At least there was no sectarian edge to McGuinness’s use of the term West Brit, as the incredibly close relationship he built with former bigot-in-chief, the Rev Ian Paisley, was such a remarkable achievement at Stormont.

But the comment does denote that while we may all be Irish citizens, he believes some Irish people are more Irish than others.

But then my opinion would, no doubt, be dismissed by McGuinness anyway, as under his bizarre Celtic equivalent of racial profiling I would not merely be damned as a West Brit, but, due to my London-Irish background, probably be condemned as an “East Brit” too.