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Ireland just stepped back from democracy

by Dan Hannan

February 17, 2020 12:00 AM

 

Ireland has just become the first European Union state to elect a party with an armed wing. Sinn Féin, which won last week’s general election on first-preference votes (though it is second, by one seat, in parliamentary representation) has long been shunned by its rivals because of its links to terrorism and organized crime.

During the election, Leo Varadkar, the outgoing prime minister, ruled out a coalition with Sinn Féin because it took instructions from the Republican paramilitary hierarchy. “We have seen that in Northern Ireland, where key decisions are not necessarily made by the people.”

Micheal Martin, who now leads the largest party, Fianna Fáil, took the same line: “The parliamentary representatives of Sinn Féin are not in control of the situation … shadowy figures dictate what happens.” Now, Martin is backpedaling, hoping that drawing the extremists into a coalition will diminish their radical chic while (conveniently) allowing him to be in government.

Sinn Féin’s supporters play down their party’s terrorist links. In their view, all that has happened is that, as in much of Europe, the old parties, and especially those of the traditional Left, have given ground to a more radical alternative.

There is a smidgen of truth in that argument. In Ireland, as across much of continental Europe, a lot of voters were looking for a populist alternative. The Irish Labor Party, like most European parties linked to trade unions, was hammered, falling to below 5%. True, it was falling from a lower point than continental social democratic parties have, but the reasons for its decline are the same: In an age when most people expect to work lots of different jobs through their lives, freelancing and reskilling regularly, parties that speak to and for industrialized workforces have little relevance.

As elsewhere, the left-of-center vote went partly to the Greens (Ireland’s Green Party secured its best-ever result, nearly tripling its vote) and to the hard Left and isolationist Sinn Féin, which in an Irish context might be called a different set of "greens." The party, which grew out of the IRA’s Marxist insurgency, espouses the sort of revolutionary nationalism associated with Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. To young voters, who have no memory of the terrorist bombs that cut down civilian targets across Northern Ireland and Great Britain, it seems almost glamorous.

Sinn Féin’s own leaders, although they won’t disavow the violence, try to avoid the subject. Two years ago, Gerry Adams, the Belfast strongman who was always assumed to be speaking for the IRA’s Army Council, was replaced as president of Sinn Féin by Mary Lou McDonald, a winsome Dubliner too young to have been involved in the terror campaigns. The violence, she would have us believe, was a regrettable if necessary phase, in which all sides did some bad things. There is no need to talk about it anymore.

Yet, although McDonald herself is removed from the grisly demimonde of the IRA, her party can’t quite shake off its vicious tendencies. When the election was called, a Sinn Féin activist complained in a WhatsApp group that the media would be “on the phone to Cahill, Stack, Quinn and all and every other waster they can wheel out with a sob story.”

Who are these “wasters”? Mairia Cahill is a West Belfast Catholic who, in 2014, went public with the fact that she had been sexually abused as a teenager by an IRA leader. Austin Stack is the son of a prison officer murdered by the IRA. Breege Quinn is the mother of Paul Quinn, who was tortured to death by the IRA in 2007; every major bone in his body was broken and his ear was torn off because he had squared up to some local IRA leaders. He was 21.

Think, for a moment, about what is implied by having such a party in government. In my 20 years as an elected representative, I often had fierce arguments with my opponents. But it never occurred to me that, as we filed out of our committee room, one of them might mutter to me, “We know where your daughters go to school.”

If McDonald herself is a cheerful, post-conflict politician, the same is not true of her candidates, who celebrated their victories with IRA songs. Those songs venerate the core belief that sustained the IRA throughout its bombing campaign, namely, that its mandate did not come from the ballot box, but from its readiness to deploy force in what it chose to interpret as the national interest. The singers may have won the vote, but that does not make them democrats.

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