O’Rourke reveals entrenched racist attitudes here
It wouldn’t be so bad if this was an isolated incident or the utterances of just one individual, but it keeps happening again and again.
In Cork, a Fianna Fáil TD blamed that city’s woefully inadequate stock of sub-standard council housing on asylum seekers rather than his party’s rubbish housing policies and in Newtonabbey, an SDLP councillor (basically the Northern Ireland division of Fianna Fáil) says his constituents are treated “like niggers”.
We’ve also had a Fianna Fáil junior minister in the Dáil referring to Turkish migrant workers as kebabs. Neither Bertie Ahern nor SDLP leader Mark Durkan have ever reprimanded these individuals. This latest of course from a party whose founder, Eamon de Valera, offered his condolences on Hitler’s death - which makes a mockery of Mary McAleese’s claim that we Unionist Prods are ‘Nazis’.
Small wonder that Fianna Fáil want to ditch the PDs and form a coalition government with the fascists of Sinn Féin/IRA in pursuit of an ethnically cleansed ‘Celtic’ Ireland. (No such thing as a Celt by the way, it’s a fictional construct.)
Perhaps Sir Bob Geldolf is right when he speaks of the intrinsic racism of the Banana Republic.
Of course when even Pat Rabbitte plays the race card we shouldn’t be surprised at more openly reactionary politicians drawing this kind of poison to its logical conclusion.
In fact, about the only thing worse than the open racism of Fianna Fáil and other nationalist parties is the kind of truculent right-wing libertarianism that whines about the freedom of the individual, or freedom of speech, bemoaning “too much political correctness”, usually in the same week as a race murder or attack - whether it be in Liverpool or Sandy Row.
The fact of the matter is that individual freedom should be stamped on hard if it’s bad for society. This means that racists don’t have rights. Not to opinions. Not to free speech.
Far from “too much political correctness”, Mary O’Rourke proves there is too little in the two nation states on the island of Ireland today.
Sadly, a lot of what applies to the intrinsic racism of Fianna Fáil (and the nationalist and republican traditions since Arthur Griffith supported anti-semitic pogroms in Limerick in 1905) applies also to that strand of traditional unionism that is incompatible with Britain’s multi-ethnic democracy - by which I mean the DUP and the ‘Love Ulster’ crowd. I’m sure they whine about political correctness, too.
Which is why, with their all-white, pre-World War II understanding of what it means to be British, they’re as big a threat to the union as the Shinners.
Roger Cottrell
Queens University
Belfast
