All’s changed, but there’s still something ’70s about Sinn Féin

A BOY scout once, I would have been on Church Parade yesterday. 

First mass, then lining up outside the church, Father coming out to bless the shamrock, distributing it, putting it on and then saluting with parents looking on. It was ceremony on an important day.

A day off school, a national holiday and a sense of being part of something. Being in the scouts, being Irish, being on show. It is peculiar how we want ritual. Important things should be marked, set apart.

Saint Patrick’s Day, Bloom’s Day, Christmas Day, special days that solemnly or synthetically mark occasions real or invented. But now it’s over for another year and the high-holiday has passed into an ordinary Wednesday.

Two weeks from next Sunday will be Easter. The following morning President Higgins will lead the nation in tribute to the leaders of the 1916 Rising, outside the GPO on Dublin’s O’Connell Street. One year thence will be the centenary, a gala to be sure.

Ceremony is affirmation. It is in signs that through contrivance, conjure up something more important than the sum of its parts. Little lads, togged out as scouts, feeling like big fellas.

Small counties and in our case an incomplete one, seeking affirmation from the world. Last night on the news, it was St Patrick’s Day around the globe. It is truly an extraordinary turn-out for one small island.

Part marketing campaign, part party, it is an identity that has metamorphosed abroad into something unrecognisable from the reality at home.

Uprooted from its last reinvention, the one I knew as a boy scout, it is reinvented now again. As a child, Saint Patrick’s Day in the 1970s seemed steeped in tradition, a timeless, holy, Irish thing. Of course it was no such thing. It was a sponge cake of history, layered with different things. Most of them were added in, adopted by an Irish state that was uncertain and incomplete.

Being incomplete has its compensations of course. The national identity, or at least its public expression was apparently straight forward. Irish, republican, catholic, mainly poor, but on special days definitely proud.

There were others on the island, a sort of apostate Irish. A bit like communist Russia, we prayed for their conversion, as distinct from their inclusion.

The British identity on our island, that ‘our’ an intentional irony, was virtually never countenanced. But in fact as everything apparently stayed the same, everything had already changed.

In visiting Terence O’Neil at Stormont in 1965, Seán Lemass effectively gave de facto recognition to the Northern Irish entity.

Before I was big enough to be a scout, first the Lemass – O’Neil talks, then Sunningdale carved in apparent failure the new dispensation that would take more than another 30 years to fulfil.

As a child I thought being Irish was a very simple thing. But as practised in the 1970’s it was hardly older than the state that sponsored it, and was already slipping back into the melting pot again.

Britishness, was only one obstacle abutting the certainty of Irish identity, women were another.

Unlike people wearing poppies who were rare, women were ostensibly everywhere. Except of course they were nowhere that mattered much. School teachers excepted, the only mature women in the workforce were spinsters.

I use that word purposefully because that is what unmarried women past an age when they could reasonably be called girls were called.

Very few women, had any choice except to work extraordinarily hard. They just didn’t have official jobs. Women were largely shrouded in the gauze of courtesy that fell short of actual respect. Social respectability mattered more that personal respect.

But that was then, and it is all changed now apparently. A moment of high symbolism, the sort of ceremony that marks really important occasions, was the reinstitution of the commemoration of the Easter rising in 2006.

It was the 90th anniversary of both the rising and of the Battle of the Somme.

When I was a little lad trouping with the scouts, I hadn’t noticed the Easter parade wasn’t happening any more, I just assumed the St Patrick’s Day parade was the only one on.

The Somme needless-to-say never entered into it. Everything seems like it has been that way forever when you are 10.

There were men togging out in black berets, dark sun glasses and pretending to be big fellas, like boy scouts, but different.

That was the reason the 1916 parade was discontinued. You couldn’t confuse the issue. We were Irish, but not that sort of Irish. We weren’t British of course, but we didn’t believe in murdering them either. But time passed on. Things changed for the better. You could be British, and Irish. You could be Irish and very relaxed and inclusive. You could be a women, have a husband if that took your fancy and still keep your job. And of course there was no need to be poor anymore; we were Irish.

2006 was an epic year. Everything was over-ripe. But we were living the dream. Even if we lost the run of ourselves a little, what matter? We deserved it. And the peace process, that was validation of Ireland’s pride. We hadn’t just got lucky, we really had something to be proud of. Odd thing was that when we all togged out on Easter Monday 2006, two of Ireland’s finest were nowhere to be found.

Neither Gerry Adams nor Martin McGuiness stood on the platform outside the GPO with President McAleese. Article 13.2 of Bunreach na hÉireann states : The supreme command of the Defence Forces is hereby vested in the President.

So on the 90th anniversary of the Rising — only nine years ago — as the Commander-in-Chief took the salute from Óglaigh na hÉireann, the defences forces of Ireland, neither of those men would take part. That’s the thing about ceremonies, they are silly stuff that mean a lot. And the meaning of that salute was clear. There was one, only one, Óglaigh na hÉireann and it was parading in O’Connell Street, not interrogating children just old enough to be boy scouts or girl guides. That’s the thing that puzzles. In the 1970’s when all was seemingly the same, everything was actually changing. Now everything is changed, except the 1970’s haven’t gone away.

Church parade was compulsory when I was in the scouts; no excuses. In a hidden Ireland interrogations, court-martials, and exiling of rapists was compulsory too. Keeping it to ourselves, singing the soldier’s song, left right, left right, eyes straight ahead. Was that all so long ago, a dirty war we can all walk away from? Small men, togged out as scouts, feeling like big fellas, ruling the roost, nobody saying boo. And the women. Every woman standing by her man and glad to have him.

There is something very ’70s about Sinn Féin.

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