In a famous 1922 speech, Winston Churchill lamented “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”, a literary device for the intercommunal conflict in Ulster which, even as great empires collapsed and new nations were born across Europe, continued with a grim and relentless dedication not far short of romantic obsession. As he remarked, “The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.”

Churchill would not have been surprised to find the steeple of County Armagh’s Drumcree Parish Church as dreary as ever on a wet Sunday afternoon in 2026. In the parish hall, a few dozen Orangemen sat waiting on folding chairs for approval from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to march down a country lane a mile or so towards the Garvaghy Road, a Catholic and strongly Nationalist and Republican suburb of largely Protestant Portadown.

The parade, banned by Northern Ireland’s Parades Commission since 1998, as a result of the drastic uptick in lethal violence its previous iterations caused across the province, had been allowed to take place this year, after the PSNI declared there was little risk of disorder occurring. The PSNI, clearly, was wrong. Thousands of Nationalists and Republicans, from across the whole of Ireland, had gathered since Saturday to join the Garvaghy Road residents who were blocking the route. An attempted start to the march, at its allotted 8am time, had been swiftly abandoned. The Orangemen now sat gloweringly waiting for the nod to go ahead. When I introduced myself as a journalist, one leapt from his chair at the other end of the room to briskly, if politely, frogmarch me from the building.

Outside the church, Nigel Dawson, the Grand Master of the Portadown Loyal Orange Lodge, was more accommodating. “All that’s happening is that we’ve been to church and we’re walking home, and they,” he added, pointing down the hill at the Garvaghy Road, “will have to move, and if they won’t, the police will have to move them.” But on the Garvaghy Road, where loudspeakers blasted Oasis and Kneecap tracks at the line where protestors confronted the PSNI, this did not look like an imminent event. The mood throughout was cheerful: rather than a riot, the intent was to dare the PSNI to use force first, which it did not. Elderly volunteers weaved through the crowd collecting litter.

When messages sporadically boomed out of the armored Landrovers warning the protestors that this was an illegal demonstration, and that they would soon be dispersed, the crowd responded with jeers, mocking laughter, or chants of “SS RUC”. Police negotiators were rebuffed: there would simply be no negotiations. “They can’t arrest us all,” Mary, an elderly local woman told me, “There’s nowhere to put us. Sure they’re already letting out all the rapists.” Mary asked me if “Halloween Face”, by which she meant the DUP politician Carla Lockhart, was still up at Drumcree. When I said she had left, she said “She’ll have turned up for the cameras and then gone on home for her dinner, that’s all they’re good for.”

Certainly, Unionist politicians were, with the brief exception of Lockhart and her DUP colleague Jonathan Buckley, notable for their absence from Drumcree. Politically divided at the best of times, Unionist politicians and commentators were debating on social media whether they had won a great moral victory or achieved a total disaster. For all the detailed local history lessons I was given by representatives of both sides, the simple binary of Northern Irish life is that the march taking place would be seen by both sides as a victory for Unionism and Loyalism over Nationalism; the march being prevented would be seen as victory of Nationalism over Unionism. If the mood was somber and numbers sparse at Drumcree, on the Garvaghy Road, the mood of impending victory had already brought forth a hundred fathers. Politicians from across the whole spectrum of Irish Nationalism and Republicanism were keen to show themselves and be seen, associating themselves and their parties with what had rapidly turned into another historic event, for a movement that lives off the compounding symbolism of historic events.

“The mood was increasingly frustrated as the Orangemen, who had formed up on the road to Portadown, were prevented from moving by riot police.”

The broader Nationalist community, politically dominated by Sinn Féin, contains a bewildering collection of micro-factions of differing shades of political opinion. All had now entirely united at a protest directed and organized by the residents of Garvaghy Road. It was an extraordinary display of cross-class and cross-border political mobilization brought about to quash what seemed to be a sudden, legally-sanctioned reversal of Loyalism’s symbolic fortunes. So total was the sudden display of unity that a number of protestors declared their anger to me that the Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin was not there alongside them, “instead of standing idly by, like his predecessor Jack Lynch did”, one added. Perhaps this displays a certain Northern detachment from Southern political currents — confronting armored police Landrovers at an illegal demonstration would not be a very Micheál Martin thing to do — but it certainly showed the mood of the moment.

Leading the blockade was local man Breandán Mac Cionnaith, formerly of the IRA and currently of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition. A softly-spoken man, Mac Cionnaith was once described by Tony Blair as the most intransigent person with whom he was ever forced to negotiate. He is due to meet with the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Chris Bryant, tomorrow. “The police will not move too many people here,” Mac Cionnaith told me. “And there’s a big difference between today and 28 years ago, when the police wouldn’t even have tolerated this, a majority Unionist, Loyalist police force… in 1985, 1996, 1997, there was no mercy shown here. It took 2,000 troops, and police, to invade this area and put us under martial law in order for an Orange march to go down that road. It’ll never be allowed to happen again.” Instead, he suggested, the standoff threatened the ability of the Orange Order to hold its marches elsewhere in Northern Ireland, as  “it’s actually putting those less contentious marches at risk, because, you know, there’s a lot of support from our communities, Nationalist communities right across the North…. So should we not send a message, well, if you’re going to mess about with the Garvaghy Road, you’re messing about with all your marches everywhere else.”

When rumors reached the crowd that the Orangemen were preparing to move, Sinn Féin MLAs linked arms at the front of the protest, as if daring to be arrested. Sinn Féin’s support has wavered in recent years, increasingly challenged by a resurgent SDLP in Northern Ireland, and hemorrhaging voters in the Republic, most particularly over the topic of immigration. Given the marked increase in immigration to Northern Ireland, even on the Garvaghy Road where a third of residents now have no identification with either Irish or British nationality, it had been theorized, particularly on the Irish anti-immigration Right, that the old loyalties would have little sway with the new residents: they would neither support nor be offended by Orangemen marching down their road for surely incomprehensible local reasons.

Interestingly, this did not appear to be the case. There were a number of African residents blockading the road alongside their ethnic Irish neighbors, and one East Timorese family traipsed along the road cheerily distributing bottles of water and packets of Tayto crisps to protesters. I asked the teenage son, who was the only one to speak English with any confidence, what he thought about the march. “We don’t need it here, this is a Nationalist community,” he told me, nodding vigorously when I asked him if he was himself an Irish Nationalist. Perhaps this dynamic is a result of the association with Loyalism with summer race riots over the past few years, or perhaps the power of Ulster’s traditional ethnic conflict is simply such that incomers happily assimilate into it.

In any case, the “new Northern Ireland”, that hopeful mantra of the country’s politicians and commentators, looked rather more like the familiar old Northern Ireland, revolving around its long-suppressed folkways, than it has in many years. On both sides, the participants dutifully fulfilled the roles allotted to them by Ireland’s history. “Fuck the sash”, “Orange scum”, and “Brits Out” graffiti marked the somber stone walls of the march route — sentiments visually at odds with the new development of handsome detached houses dividing the Orangemen from their unwilling mooted audience. Aside from a large handmade banner proclaiming “From Gaza to Garvaghy Road: Resist Occupation and Fascism”, there was little sign of the Palestine flag so central to recent Irish Republican mobilization: instead it was the Starry Plough of Irish Republican Socialism that fluttered from every lamppost alongside the Irish tricolor.

I asked Gerry Carroll, a popular West Belfast MLA for the socialist all-island People Before Profit party, if he was concerned at the prospect of arrest. “I’m not really bothered about that, to be perfectly honest, you know?” he replied. As for the collection of politicians to be seen, it was, he added, a broad front on display today. “It’s a broad swathe of Republican opinion here, obviously we’re a socialist organization, we are here. Other Left people, independents, people kind of came together. There’s obviously disagreements on many issues, but I think people are united in the fact that if this goes ahead, then there’s this open season for hardline, right-wing Loyalism, and that would be pretty devastating for Garvaghy Road, but also people right across the North…there’s a bigger battle here today.”

At the Drumcree Community Trust community center, a hub for local Nationalists, protesters from across Ireland charged their phones, chatted, dozed on playmats repurposed as mattresses, and drank vast quantities of hot tea. Volunteers produced tray after tray of sandwiches in apparently endless succession. “I have a 25 year old son myself,” Róisín, who had driven up from rural Leitrim across the border, told me. “I called him yesterday morning, and I told him, I’m sorry I wasn’t going to be able to go to Dublin to visit him. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, I’m going to the Garvaghy Road. He said, ‘Where is the Garvaghy Road?’ He’d never heard of the Garvaghy Road. Now, I’m not saying it’s not a beautiful place and a great community, but thank God. My 25 year old, my son, had never heard of it because there hasn’t been trouble in 28 years. And the Orange Order decided they wanted to walk over people in this community and bring back the Troubles again. And to me, it breaks my heart that there’s youngsters out there, the same age as my son, that never saw trouble in this country, and now they’ve been brought back into it again.”

That the march was proposed at all, Paul Doherty, formerly Deputy Mayor of Belfast for the constitutional nationalist SDLP, and now a popular local independent councilor and community activist in West Belfast, told me, was really a story about divisions within Unionism and Loyalism, particularly in the wake of the DUP’s macabre recent legal travails. “We’ve an election next year as well, and I believe the DUP are electioneering, and they’re ramping up tensions in the North of Ireland, here, for political gain. And I think that is quite shocking, and I think they’re dragging people in, who are unelected, people like [Loyalist activist] Jamie Bryson, who are ramping up tensions. I mean, when tensions are ramped up here, when rhetoric is ramped up, we know what the consequences are.” But it had been, he mused, a failure of governance more generally. “I think people need to sit down and reflect upon what has happened here today and the poor decision-making that has come from the top and the impact that it’s had, and the impact that potentially can have on stability here, and for peace in the North.”

Back at Drumcree, the mood was increasingly frustrated as the Orangemen, who had formed up on the road to Portadown, were prevented from moving by riot police, who had now completely withdrawn from the Garvaghy Road, and re-established themselves in a long armored convoy outside the church. “They’re asking me what my plan is and I intend to stay here,” Dawson told me, as his fellow Orangemen stood in ranks behind him. “And I said, listen, that’s the wrong question. You need to answer my question that I’ve asked now five times today. What time are you coming to bring us home? And we haven’t got a response to that yet.” Instead, the police were now informing them that the march could not go ahead for the marchers’ own safety. “We have given a clear commitment,” he told me, “even though we’re not happy with the policing, but we’ve also gave a clear commitment, that we will abide by the direction of the police. That’s who we are and we’re not going to step outside that.”

I asked Dawson, given all the trouble it was causing, to explain to readers outside Northern Ireland why it was so important to march down the Garvaghy Road in the first place, and not choose another route. “So you’ve got to know who we are, first of all,” he replied. “The Orange Institution. So we’re a massive organization, but Portadown District, who I represent, it was the first district ever formed in their history. We were in place before the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was ever constituted, and we came to church in Drumcree in 1807, and have done so on Sundays, once a year, ever since. So this is our tradition, and we are a traditional organization. It’s part of our history, part of our culture, part of our heritage, part of who we are. And that’s why it’s important to us. So that’s why we can’t walk a different route. Because our forefathers walked this in 1807.”

Wearing a Rangers gilet, the Loyalist activist and legal advisor to the Portadown Lodge, Jamie Bryson — a prominent and influential figure in Northern Irish politics — told a crowd of Loyalists who had gathered in support that the PSNI were now asking the Lodge to stand down, “to give them a way out for their appalling policing all day”. But, he added, to cheers and claps, “We will not give them a way out. The PSNI have caused this, they have failed in their legal obligations,” and had a legal duty still to to allow the march to take place. “The only option open to them if they can’t is go to the Secretary of State, cap in hand, and ask him to revoke the determination of the Parades Commission, which he said he had full confidence in. So, it’s a big problem between the PSNI and the Secretary of State, but as far as I’m concerned the Unionist and Loyalist community shouldn’t be solving that for them.”

I asked Bryson, given the PSNI’s seeming incapacity to allow the parade to take place, what this meant for the writ of the state in Northern Ireland. “The law has been completely undermined,” he told me. “We have the First Minister engaged in an illegal protest, on the Garvaghy Road, we have a mob now, the Republican mob, and the PSNI have shown themselves incapable of dealing with this mob. So that’s the present situation.” Asked if he thought, realistically, he would march down the Garvaghy Road that day, he replied “I think that the law has to be upheld. And I think that if it’s not, that the consequences for the political stability of Northern Ireland is going to be absolutely profound.”

While I was up the hill at Drumcree, Sinn Féin party leader Mary Lou McDonald and First Minister Michelle O’Neill were down on the Garvaghy Road urging protesters to stay out “until at least midnight”, when the permission for the march would expire. I asked Bryson if the day’s events would have ramifications for Northern Ireland’s devolved Stormont executive, where Sinn Féin politicians blockading the road share power with DUP politicians accusing their colleagues in government of “participating in an unlawful protest” and “giving two fingers to the police, the courts, and the rule of law”. His answer was instantaneous. “The DUP should collapse the executive in the morning, in my view,” he told me. “I’m not a member of the DUP. I don’t speak for the DUP, but I mean, it’s an intolerable suggestion that the DUP would remain in Stormont.”

Certainly, for Chris Bryant, the risk is growing that his role will suddenly become more hands-on than any sensible Westminster politician would wish. Adding to the many unwanted headaches direct rule will bring to the Burnham government is Reform’s sudden and unexpected interest in Northern Irish politics, shown by Danny Kruger’s speech at the DUP conference last week in which he praised their “Ulster granite” and proposed vague but significant new restrictions on the Common Travel Area. In a Sunday night tweet, Kruger observed that “The First Minister of Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein‘s Michelle O’Neill, has joined an illegal protest blocking a march that is allowed by law. The lawful management of parades was a key article of the peace process and for Sinn Fein to be joining illegal street action is a terrible step backwards.”

While it is common enough for Northern Irish politicians to complain of Westminster’s neglect, they may yet find it preferable to a sudden burst of interest from their British counterparts, in a situation where devolved governance is no longer tenable. One possible next party of British government is, after all, increasingly flirting with Ulster Loyalism, rather than the respectable and ineffective middle-class Unionism with which the Conservative Party is most comfortable. In such a scenario, the logic for Sinn Féin to push for a border poll, already a longstanding demand, becomes almost inescapable.

For the mostly middle-class Orange Order, and the broader swath of working-class Loyalist opinion sympathetic to it, it will not go unnoticed that attempts to follow the letter of the law, and utilize the legally mandated dispute managing mechanisms of the Northern Irish state, entirely failed. The newly traditional summer race riots, on the other hand, both win London and the world’s horrified attention, and swiftly achieve their intended results. In a country where the state’s coercive power is strikingly weak, a march that never took place, of 35 men down a few hundred meters of contested road, may have political consequences far beyond a rainy Sunday in a small Ulster town.

Not in 1971, when he was photographed in a black beret, marching in a guard of honour at the funeral of a Provisional IRA man. Not in 1972, when he was flown to London with Martin McGuinness and the IRA chief of staff Sean Mac Stíofáin for secret talks with the British government (Mac Stíofáin later categorised the delegation as “All IRA”). Not in 1987, when he was asked about the murder of Charles McIlmurray — a West Belfast taxi driver whose body had been found with a plastic bag over his face, his hands tied behind his back, and a gunshot wound to the head. He responded by saying on camera, almost indignantly: “Mr McIlmurray, like anyone living in West Belfast, knows that the consequence of informing is death.” Not in 1993, when he helped to carry the coffin of Thomas Begley, an IRA man who died when a bomb he was carrying prematurely exploded in a Shankill Road fish shop, killing 9 Protestants, including two children. And never in the Nineties, when both he and McGuinness were central to the drawn-out negotiations that ultimately led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the cessation of the IRA’s long campaign.

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By his own account, Adams himself was more of a loyal, if prominent, camp follower of the IRA, a reliable defender and justifier of the “armed struggle”, although not of everything it did. His fealty, however, ran deep: as he told the 2019 Ballymurphy Inquest, “I have never disassociated myself from the IRA, and I never will, until the day I die.” And, as he also informed the court in a Dublin libel action last year, “I have never resiled from my view that the IRA’s campaign, whatever about elements of it, was a legitimate response to military occupation.”

So, if he argues that he wasn’t an IRA member, what does he want or expect the public to believe he was? An intensely supportive yet occasionally questioning political co-traveller, it seems, who never joined the organisation yet nonetheless was involved in much of its most crucial decision-making over a period of more than 30 years.

Others have a very different story to tell. They include diehard but outspoken IRA men and women; British and Irish intelligence and security services and politicians; and journalists steeped in decades of reporting on the Troubles. Over the years, Adams’s continuing assertion that he had never joined the IRA began to rankle with a lot of people, including a number who had formerly been his close associates and freely admitted their own past membership. As time wore on, some former friends in the “republican movement” felt that Adams’s denial had become more than a pragmatic strategy to avoid arrest — the IRA was, and is, a proscribed organisation — and more of a long-term psychological and moral get-out clause. Some, such as his old Long Kesh comrade Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, felt Adams was managing somehow to distance himself from the blood and misery of the IRA’s long campaign, and from any direct responsibility for the suffering of its victims. Nor did Hughes favour the Good Friday Agreement, which he felt rendered the IRA’s campaign, and its heavy toll in human suffering, meaningless by settling for less than its original aim of a united Ireland.

Hughes himself had engineered the appalling “Bloody Friday”, 21 July 1972, when more than 20 IRA bombs went off simultaneously in Belfast, killing nine and injuring over 130 others. But when interviewed in later life by the former IRA man Anthony McIntyre, Hughes said that Adams, in a strategic role, “was the man who made the decisions”. Troubled by the long shadow of the conflict, Hughes died early, at 59. Of Adams’s IRA membership, he had said frustratedly, “Everybody knows it. The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs on the street know it. And he’s standing there denying it.”

*****

The dogs on the proverbial Belfast street, famously alert to politics as they are, are not habitually called upon to give evidence in British courtrooms. That task is left to others. Earlier this month, in Court 16 of the Royal Courts of Justice, Gerry Adams — by now the senior statesman of republican politics — sat on a court bench for hours, then days, as he calmly listened to barristers and witnesses debating his CV. Now and then he got up to stretch his back.

The space next to him was frequently occupied by his longstanding friend Richard McAuley, who was also a fellow prisoner in Long Kesh in the Seventies. McAuley has a long history in Sinn Féin public relations. Back in 1981, in his role as Provisional Sinn Féin press officer, he helpfully explained the rules of IRA “punishment” shootings of youthful miscreants to a curious New York Times reporter. “No one is kneecapped who is below the age of 16. If he is under 16, he might get a beating.” Most people, he said, were in fact shot in the thigh and not the knee: “They’re in the hospital for a day or two and they hobble around for a week after. It’s more the scare that’s effective than the injury itself. It’s awfully frightening to sit and watch a man pointing a gun at your leg. You have to be very bad to be shot in the knee, and if you are very, very bad you are shot in the kneecaps and elbows.” The Belfast orthopaedic surgeon quoted immediately after McAuley was not so sanguine about the level of long-term damage: he said that roughly 10% of such shootings resulted in amputations, and one-in-five victims would walk with a permanent limp.

Also in the courtroom, sitting on the long bench behind Adams, was Barry Laycock, 86, one of three claimants in this crowd-funded civil action brought against the former Sinn Féin leader. Laycock, a British Rail worker at the time, was injured when the IRA’s 1996 bomb in Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre blew him across the room. He has lived with constant pain ever since, which he dulls with morphine patches. His expression was stoically impassive, but his blue eyes watched proceedings intently. His co-claimants, John Clark and Jonathan Ganesh, were victims of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing and the 1996 Docklands bombing, respectively.

The three claimants sought to establish that Adams was not only a member of the IRA, but was instrumental in directing the bombing campaigns which had caused them lasting pain and distress. They were asking for “vindicatory” damages of just £1 each, but the real point of the exercise, Laycock explained, was that “I want to see justice in the end, and I want to see closure”. The witnesses on behalf of the claimants — testifying to Adams’s pivotal role within the IRA — included a former IRA letter-bomber, a former RUC special branch intelligence officer, a BBC investigative journalist, and a retired Army commander.

Some spoke from beyond the grave. At the end of the court sitting on Monday 16 March, Gerry Adams sat listening carefully, stroking his beard with a greater frequency than usual. The rasping, confiding voice filling the courtroom was that of the late Dolours Price, a former IRA member. Along with her sister, Marian, she had gained notoriety for her active role in a series of London bombings in 1973: as two good-looking young Belfast women, they had attracted unusual levels of publicity and opprobrium when put on trial, and had been force-fed during their hunger strike in jail. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph a year before her death at the age of 62, Price recounted how, in advance of the London campaign, Adams had attended a meeting in Leeson Street, Belfast, and warned those present: “This is a dangerous operation, but a big operation.” He had told those who did not wish to be involved that they could leave, she said. It was clear that Price still retained a certain pride in being one of the women who stayed, when so many men had left: “I said: ‘Hey, lads, don’t knock me down in the rush’. Swear to God, they ran out the door.”

On Wednesday, an immaculately besuited Adams took to the witness stand for his second day. The previous day, March 17, had been his first experience of cross-examination in an English court: he had taken the time to wish the judge, Justice Swift, “Happy St Patrick’s Day”. Throughout the questioning from Sir Max Hill KC, acting for the claimants, the former Sinn Féin leader’s manner was measured, if occasionally prickly, and impeccably evasive. Bespectacled and silver-bearded, dutifully scouring the court papers — with a recurrent difficulty in locating relevant detail that may or may not have had an intended effect of breaking up Hill’s flow — he had the puzzled yet attentive air of a retired sea captain invited to pore over a fusty log book.

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Over the decades, Adams has perfected a response when directly confronted with indignation over IRA killings. He regrets the suffering of all the victims of violence during the Troubles, he says, including those of the IRA. When particularly horrific cases of IRA murder are pointed out to him, he doesn’t hesitate to say that a particular act was “wrong”. Then he goes on to talk with practised certainty and cadence about civil rights and British occupation and armed struggle and the republican movement. He proclaimed himself “stunned” by the 1996 IRA Docklands bomb.

Alongside such lulling assurances, he doggedly continues to celebrate IRA members who committed sectarian horrors against their fellow Northern Irish men and women. On his X/Twitter account, where he now describes himself as an “Optimistic and Hopeful Activist”, Adams recently retweeted a commemoration for Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, remembered “with pride”. The president of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, staunchly echoed the sentiment, saying of the late IRA man that he “dedicated his life to the pursuit of freedom, unity, peace and equality…it was a life well lived.” McFarlane, as the 24-year-old leader of a three-man unit of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, was the driver for a 1975 IRA gun and bomb attack on the Bayardo Bar in the Protestant Shankill Road. In it, five people were killed, and 31 injured. One, a 17-year-old girl called Linda Boyle, was pulled out of the rubble. She took a week to die of her injuries. Her younger sister Anne, who was 15 when Linda died, said last year, “Me and Linda shared a bedroom together. I remember the exact clothes she wore that morning going to work. It never goes away.”

It is this frequent clash between an official republican narrative and victims’ reality that leads many Northern Ireland Protestants to mistrust Adams in particular and Sinn Féin in general, along with their own future position in any united Ireland where the party plays a leading role. They know that — behind Sinn Féin’s palatable talk of inclusivity — if it ever faces a choice between mythologising IRA members and acknowledging the human misery that they caused, the former will win out. This has its dark mirror in the Loyalist paramilitaries and their grotesque commemorations for the sectarian killers of Catholic civilians: these organisations, too, publicly confirm their existence by riding roughshod over the pain of the bereaved. But the political traction of Sinn Féin, and therefore its domination of the narrative across Ireland and beyond, is far greater. It is now the biggest single party in Northern Ireland, and the second largest party in the Republic of Ireland.

There was one moment, on his second day of giving evidence, when the net did seem to tighten somewhat around Adams’s IRA membership. It related to Adams’s authorship of the “Brownie” columns in the Seventies, which were written under a pseudonym from inside Long Kesh and published in Republican News. He admitted that he had written some of them, but not all. In one, entitled “Double Talk”, published in May 1976, the author said outright, “Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer”. That particular one, Adams said, was in fact written by Richard McAuley. But the column spoke of the author’s wife and young son, said Hill, and at that point McAuley had neither — yet it accurately described Adams’s own family set-up. And the last “Brownie” article, published five days after Adams was released from Long Kesh in 1977, once again referenced his wife and child, and their reunion.

Throughout the trial, Adams had produced some form of answer, most often that anyone who said he was in the IRA had a political axe to grind. But on “Brownie”, he seemed temporarily to have run out of arguments: the column, and its contents, has dogged him for decades. Only The Irish Times, which reported the case in some detail, gave the exchange its proper weight. But then, two days later, all the carefully accumulated evidence fell away, because the case collapsed. The judge raised the issue of “abuse of process” — in which a case brought for one reason appears to be a proxy for another — and with it the prospect that the claimants might become liable for Adams’s legal fees, something they had previously been assured would not happen. Suddenly facing the possibility of terrifying personal bills, the claimants felt compelled to discontinue their case with no order as to costs. Barry Laycock, who had hoped for closure, said he was “completely devastated”.

Although the case has succeeded in airing an argument, its conclusion on Adams now remains legally undetermined. Many in the public at large, and perhaps the British establishment, are content to let it stay that way. The appetite for news on Northern Ireland and its sorrowful histories has sharply waned in England. In Ireland, in recent years, Sinn Féin has been retrospectively refashioning the chief impetus for the IRA’s campaign from an “armed struggle” for a united Ireland into one for Catholic civil rights (an argument most neatly, if fiercely, skewered by the late dissident republican Kevin Hannaway, Adams’s cousin and a former IRA man, who was quoted in 2019 saying: “If they were out for an Irish Republic, they failed. If they were out for civil rights, they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”).

The veteran BBC journalist John Ware, explaining why he was giving evidence for the claimants, said quietly, “as journalists you have an obligation to prevent falsehoods of this magnitude from becoming settled in history… I’m interested in objective truth.” While Adams had indeed played a key role in bringing about an IRA ceasefire, he said, the “rather important missing bit” was the part he had played in the conflict.

Yet, internationally, objective truth is at present having a particularly rocky time. In the multiple fragmented perspectives thrown up by online media, there’s increasingly only “your truth” and “my truth” rather than “the truth”. For many people, facts are a shrinking source of interest: they want stories instead. It’s a cultural shift that has found its ultimate political expression in Donald Trump, and his constant generation of unreliable assertions. Adams was, in many ways, ahead of his time in realising that if you only expound a line doggedly enough, the public memory of what actually happened fades and blurs — apart from for those most directly affected — to be replaced by a narrative of choice. And Sinn Féin’s narrative, in which Provisional IRA freedom fighters reluctantly but bravely took up arms in Northern Ireland primarily to claim their civil rights from the “Orange State”, is one that strongly appeals to many younger voters — so long as the bereaved and the body parts can be successfully kept in the background. The party has been bolstering its position with a high volume of legal actions against journalists, at times raising concerns among press freedom organisations.

At one point during the case, Adams seemed to step back and take a more detached view. Watching proceedings, he said, “I listened to what I thought was old men squabbling over a war that’s over.” Somewhat disarmingly, he included himself, now 77, among that number. But the impression of spent forces is disingenuous. The IRA’s war might indeed be over, but Sinn Féin’s battle for Ireland and control of its narratives is very much alive. And the party is keeping firmly in mind a lesson drawn from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

My earliest memory of Margaret Thatcher, born a century ago today, was not a photograph or footage but graffiti on the side of Brutalist flats. It was painted rather than sprayed, in those days. Ireland being consumed by Great Britain, with the West coast of Scotland morphing into Thatcher’s face as she gnawed on Ulster with crazed eyes like Goya’s Saturn. I was scared shitless at the time but grew used to the image. And as the years passed, I would see her effigy dragged out and immolated in different places that all shared the common denominator of state callousness. Poll Tax riot sites. Post-Hillsborough Liverpool. South Yorkshire pit villages. Virtually anywhere in Scotland or Wales. Even the soundtrack had a sacrificial quality — Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” or Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine”, which earned him a grilling from Special Branch for fear he’d dispatch the Prime Minister with a withering swipe of a flaccid gladioli.

There were any number of reasons for ordinary citizens to loathe Thatcher from the miners to Section 28 to the Belgrano, the third-degree burn catastrophe of deindustrialization and the slow-burn catastrophe of financial deregulation. In Northern Ireland, she somehow eclipsed even the folk memory of the Black and Tans and Cromwell, entering the mythic. Even then, supernatural figures like the banshee, dearg due, the bánánach and the abhartach seemed sympathetic by comparison.

Few would admit it then, or now, in Irish Republican circles, but Thatcher was the demon Sinn Féin needed, and she became one of their greatest benefactors. It had been very difficult, after all, to galvanize total resistance to the securocrats of the previous Labour governments and Ted Heath’s administration. Here was an archetype. In attempting to destroy them, she made them what they are now.

Thatcher’s Northern Irish debut was a horror show. A month before her election victory, her advisor on the province, Airey Neave, was assassinated leaving the House of Commons. Neave had been a war hero, escaping Colditz, personally serving Nuremberg Trial indictments to the likes of Goering, Speer and Hess in their cells, and was known as a force to be reckoned with. The Irish National Liberation Army, a Marxist splinter group and rival of the Irish Republican Army, placed a bomb underneath his driver’s seat with a mercury tilt switch, which activated as he drove his Vauxhall up the exit ramp. As a shot across the bows, it was exceptionally brutal. It would also seem immensely counter-productive if the cause of a United Ireland and/or Civil Rights for Catholics were assumed to be the aims of the Republican movement; but assume, we should not.

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Thatcher entered, with her garlands, into a bloodbath. Republican snipers and land mines had been sapping the morale and increasing the paranoia of the security services in the north. Lord Mountbatten was blown apart on his boat, along with his grandson, a fellow aristocrat and a cabin boy. This was followed by the Narrow Water Massacre, where a passing convoy of the Parachute Regiment (the perpetrators of the Bloody Sunday Massacre of civil rights protestors in Derry) was targeted by a massive roadside bomb. The Provisional IRA responded, by remote control, from across the border, with a double-tap blast, beloved of contemporary geopolitical powers, as a helicopter ferried away the injured. Eighteen soldiers were killed, as well as a civilian when survivors began to fire across the border.

If there were a time when it felt like the IRA would win, this was it. Thatcher felt it too, so she attempted to change the framing of the war into simple criminality and a law-and-order issue. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,” she claimed, “as much as my constituency is”, which given Finchley at the time was not a place where civil rights activists were murdered with impunity or one section of the population had been subject to internment without trial or shoppers had their limbs blown off or daily assassinations were commonplace was a misnomer. Indeed, her insistence on normality just illustrated the abnormality of the place and situation — a colonized foothold of an island-nation effectively ruled over by a rheumatic and bellicose police force and a sash-draped organization that were Cargo Cult British. Northern Ireland, to the British and the southern Irish, was Bedlam.

In reality, the Lady was for turning. Declassified records from 1983 reveal that Thatcher raised the idea of a “tactical withdrawal” to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Jim Prior, and it was only, seemingly, turned down because Prior argued that it would lead to all-out civil war. It is still hard for Unionists and Loyalists to accept such orphan judgments, but equally it is of cold comfort to magical thinking Republicans who are not going to conjure away a million or so Unionists/Loyalists when our day comes. At that point, escalation from an already horrific state of affairs was a likely possibility and the Republic government knew it. Yet it shows how close the IRA came to a United Ireland. At the same time, the high-profile attacks that had raised Republican morale had soured Irish American relations enough for the US to begin to stop the pipeline of support, forcing them to seek assistance from the nefarious enemies of my enemies.

This demonstrates a privately practical Thatcher, as well as the basket case of Northern Ireland. And yet she clung. Perhaps it was Airey Neave or doubts about her role in a world of old boys and hard men. But Thatcher made it personal and ultimately misjudged and lost. Her aim was not peace but unconditional surrender, with a degree of humiliation. For all the inevitable whataboutery, the British state was the only force that could have dialed down, if not turned off the violence, killing the civil rights issue with kindness for example, and yet Thatcher dialed it up.

At the same time, the comment by Sinn Féin’s Danny Morrison that she was “The biggest bastard we have ever known” was canny. There was no love lost, yet there’s a sneaking sense of  “We could do something with this”. Thatcher’s intransigence and militarism would eventually radicalize and galvanize the Irish nationalist community and ultimately spelt the decline of the moderate SDLP. She escalated the prison protests and hunger strikes into a battle of wills, locking horns with Sinn Féin, which made the latter seem totemically powerful to the Catholic community and then, because of the deaths of the hunger strikers, this spread to the international media. It also made the battle a sacred affair, with the saintly starving neo-Catholic martyrs versus the satanic Thatcher. Having made her name as the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter, she was ill-equipped for the irrationalism of Celtic eschatology.

So, Thatcher provided the devil that the faceless bureaucrats of the pre-Thatcher era could not. Her Iron Lady ego forced Northern Ireland out of multiple possible paths and into a binary where the citizenry had to pick for or against. This played into Sinn Féin’s hands, though they would never admit it, and is actually a strategy that the activist Saul Alinsky advocated in Seventies America — find or create a common enemy to centralize and radicalize opposition and push out other more ameliorative or alternative voices. I saw this in Derry where the SDLP, who had bravely had their heads cracked open on civil rights marches for years and largely came from trade union and teaching backgrounds, become overnight, thanks to Thatcher, the Stoop Down Low Party in the eyes of the community.

It all crystallized with the Hunger Strikes. Her insistence that the Troubles was criminal rather than political was self-defeating, inadvertently showing Sinn Féin, via Bobby Sands, the power of the ballot box. Their “Armalite and ballot box” strategy being an evolutionary device. She unintentionally gave them a way forward that has since proved immensely profitable. It was in both directions an exercise in cynicism. Thatcher was onto something when she said: “It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members.” At the same time, her insistence that the “PIRA have put the Catholic Community on the rack” during this time is abject, given everything the British state had put the Catholic community through.

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Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

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In hindsight, it seems two factors made armed struggle untenable in the long run. The first, in sort, is the role of MI5 and informers or touts. It is still unclear to what extent Sinn Féin were riddled with double agents, how high it went and how it directed policy in the long term. Thatcher can take some credit for this, if anything positive can be salvaged from it, given she increased the intelligence services’ role in the conflict (their involvement with Loyalist death squads is still a pressing but taboo issue). The second was Ulsterization, initiated not by Thatcher but by earlier governments, who sought to contain the conflict within the borders of Northern Ireland, tacitly believing the population to be expendable and accurately believing the IRA could only really make an impact on the mainland (the high-profile bombing of which — Canary Wharf, for example — ultimately intensified negotiations). Both were incredibly cynical and effective.

Though Thatcher claimed as her mentor the wily Dubliner Edmund Burke, her ego meant she failed to pay heed to his wisdom, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Her opponents suffered from the same hubris as she did, dining out still on how close they came to taking her out in Brighton, endlessly repeating “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always”, a quote that ultimately proved untrue and indulgent. Had they succeeded, there is every chance their actions would have resulted in martial law and more suffering for northern Catholics, along with more bolstering of their positioning. One more boost to the ascendancy of Sinn Féin, perhaps the true aim rather than a United Ireland or civil rights equity.

Today Sinn Féin are adjacent to the blob, and more equivalent to Sturgeon-era SNP — albeit with concrete-filled weapons bunkers and piles of bodies as unavoidable as the Brits’ or the Loyalists’. They talk of a United Ireland, only one under their tutelage and for their benefit. If it happens, and almost a million Unionists will require accommodating, it will, given the dire state of the south and the north, be an unrecognizable Ireland to that which we dreamed and to the one we must start dreaming afresh, with a knowledge of yesterday’s victims and without yesterday’s ghouls. Their day has come, and, like Thatcher’s, it has passed.

Standing as a Tory in Northern Ireland is like riding a Gloucester Old Spot in the Grand National. It takes some pluck. The word “Tory” has its origins in the Irish language (possibly from toiraidh, meaning outlaw), but that’s about the extent of the Conservative Party’s connection to the place today. The Northern Irish Conservative is the local representative of an indifferent blue mass, over the sea and far away. Occasional visits from London do not tend to go well, as Rishi Sunak found out in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter last month, when what should have been a simple press conference became a fiasco freighted with dire symbolism as he was asked if his party was akin to a sinking ship.

The Northern Ireland Conservatives describe themselves as “the positive, centre-right, pro-union alternative to the parochial politics which has blighted Northern Ireland”. In 2019, they won a vote share of 0.7%. It’s not difficult to see why. Unionists here can vote for the DUP or TUV, parties far more committed to the union and far more conservative than the Tories will ever be, while voters wanting a less strident unionism can opt for the UUP. Naturally, all of these parties have healthy representation in local government and the NI Assembly, which isn’t something the NI Conservatives can claim. Ask people over here why the Tories run candidates in Northern Ireland and they will shrug — the Conservative and Unionist Party must be seen to contest seats in all four nations of the UK, so they do, and eat their losses. That’s it.

Still, I was interested in these eccentric Tories, so far from the shires. What sort of person would stand for the Conservatives in Northern Ireland? It goes so against the grain that it’s almost punk. Such people would have to be tough, to have a certain dash about them. I had hoped to speak to the candidates about the campaign, but received no response to my requests for an interview. The party political broadcast was no help, just a turgid breakdown of Labour’s manifesto costings. There wasn’t much information online, either: a slim website, a small Facebook group, and an X account that has been suspended for weeks now. So I went to Newtownards, 10 miles east of Belfast, to talk to voters like William. If I couldn’t get a birds-eye view of the Tory campaign in Northern Ireland, I’d explore the ground instead.

Newtownards should have been a good place to begin my hunt. It’s the largest town in the Strangford constituency and has a strong unionist base. The Tory candidate is Barry Hetherington, a Fermanagh man who is the Deputy Chair of the NI Conservatives. There’s little chance of winning more than a handful of votes here. But then there’s little chance of winning more than a handful of votes anywhere in Northern Ireland. Having taken the trouble to stand, you might as well campaign. And yet there’s nothing. 

Other parties — DUP, TUV, Alliance — have diligently festooned the lampposts with posters. The Conservatives haven’t bothered. It doesn’t look as if their canvassing game is up to much either. With the election in less than three weeks, the people of Newtownards seem unaware that a Tory is running at all. I ask Kathleen, 60s, if she knows that voting Conservative is an option. “No, I didn’t realise that. We’re usually pretty well-informed. And we’re getting close now, aren’t we? We got our [poll] cards through the post yesterday.”

The most common reaction to my questions is weary amusement. Everyone’s face does the same thing. Lips tighten, noses wrinkle, eyes shine. When I ask Hazel, a woman in her 40s, whether she’s aware that the Tories are running here, she smiles broadly. “I’m sure they are,” she says, hoisting an eyebrow. “But I’m not really interested in the Tories.” I wander down the street to Déjà Vu Hair, where I meet Leah, 18. Hetherington’s candidature is news to her, too. Would she vote Conservative? “No.”

A few days later, I hopped on to a bus to Downpatrick. Strangford had been a bust, but perhaps I’d have more luck in the adjoining constituency of South Down. This is a beautiful country. Drumlins rise and fall, boreens ferret away between tightly packed fields, and the Mourne Mountains are stamped indigo on the horizon. I might have gone to Newcastle, a fine town on the Irish Sea, or to Rostrevor on Carlingford Lough. But I chose Downpatrick, with its Georgian houses and hilly streets, for its relative size and status as the county town. 

South Down has been a Sinn Féin constituency since 2017, and a reliable nationalist win for decades before that. The Conservative running here is Hannah Westropp, whose rather coy candidate bio leaves it unclear whether she lives in Northern Ireland or has been Izzarded in from England. 

Downpatrick is a smaller, quieter place than Newtownards. The lampposts advertise Sinn Féin and Alliance. Most of the people I approach, quite sensibly, don’t want to talk about the election. The response of one friendly old gent at a bus stop on St Patrick’s Avenue was typical: “Sorry, mate. I’ve no interest in it. Fed up. No interest at all.” Eventually, I strike lucky. A woman on Market Street knows that a Tory is contesting South Down. I’m intrigued. Had she seen a poster, got a leaflet through the letterbox? “No, it was on Radio Ulster, they went through all the candidates.” This was the only person aware of a local Tory campaign. Otherwise, the situation in South Down was no different to Strangford: a ghost hunt. 

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Belfast is crumbling

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On the bus back to Belfast, rain spotting the windows, I admitted defeat. Granted, the Tories are standing in three other constituencies — East Londonderry, West Tyrone, and Newry and Armagh. Maybe Coleraine is a hotbed of Tory activism. Perhaps if I’d gone out to Tyrone I might have witnessed an electrifying rally on the streets of Strabane, blue rosettes winking in the sun. For all I know, the people of Newry can barely walk down Merchants Quay without being harangued by a Conservative canvasser. Somehow, though, I doubt it. 

The NI Conservatives march on paper alone. It’s a bizarre situation, and easy to make light of. But there’s a bleaker side to all this, too. Northern Ireland is creaking at the seams. Recent recommended cuts to the NHS were so extreme that the Health Minister has simply refused to make them. Infrastructure is failing, homelessness is rising, and Lough Neagh, once the UK’s largest freshwater lake, is now the world’s largest petri dish. In such times, a party that treats Northern Ireland as a political Wendy house ceases to be funny. 

If the NI Conservatives are good for anything, it’s as a warning to their own colleagues across the water. Friendless, decisively outnumbered, shuffling unremarked from election to election, Northern Ireland’s Tories may well offer a glimpse of the party’s future throughout the United Kingdom. Where they will go from there is anyone’s guess. William said it best, that day in front of Newtownards Town Hall. I don’t think they know themselves.

This was to be the largest demonstration yet for Ireland’s nascent anti-immigration movement, hyped on social media as a countrywide show of force. While the inchoate movement has already changed the tenor of Irish politics, putting the country’s fragile coalition government on the back foot, it so far has no electoral representation. The Bank Holiday Monday protest aimed to change that, channeling a disparate set of local protest groups, fuelled by social-media anger, into a national electoral force for next month’s European and local elections.

“We’re expecting quite a big protest here today, all right,” Andy Heasman, the tweed-capped Dublin European election candidate for the Irish People party, an umbrella coalition of populist independents, told me. “There’ll be a lot of people here from the inner city. So we’ve a message to give them today that we’re ready to stand up for the Irish people, whether it be for immigration, housing, the indoctrination of children that’s happened, the NGOs, which have captured our media, and politics and government policy…” As I spoke to Heasman, his colleague filmed me on her mobile phone — perhaps the most marked trait of the activists on the march was a suspicion of journalists bordering on hostility, derived from the belief that the Irish press is working to marginalise them as extremists. “We wouldn’t talk to [state broadcaster] RTÉ,” an older woman, who had been loudly condemning what she called “Sharia Féin” told me: “Sure, if I said the sky was blue they’d say I said it was red.”

As the crowd assembled to march through the city centre, the delegation from Newtownmountkennedy, the rural Wicklow village where protestors clashed with Gardaí over the bussing in of migrants from central Dublin, shuffled to the front behind their banner to loud cheers. Maybe two or three thousand protestors had turned up, the Garda officer overseeing the demonstration told me: the organisers placed the figure at far more, and the Irish press at far less. As they marched through central Dublin, waving Irish tricolours and shouting “Get Them Out” and “You’ll Never Beat the Irish”, bemused tourists watched on from pub terraces. Working-class Dubliners were heavily represented, along with older couples from the provinces and a remarkable number of populist influencers, their selfie-sticks wavering in the air. Outside the GPO, the site of the Easter rebellion that eventually created the modern Irish state, Gardaí Public Order units in body armour separated the thousands of marchers from a few dozen Left-wing counter-protestors, waving Palestinian and Spanish Republican flags and chanting “Refugees are welcome here” through loudhailers. Sinn Féin, previously a staple of pro-migration activism, was notable for its absence: with the anti-immigration movement cutting into its support base in working-class Dublin, Ireland’s largest party has begun to pivot on its previous pro-migration platform, now voicing opposition to “open borders” and the new EU migration pact.

But that wasn’t enough for the protestors, loudly shouting “Sinn Féin traitors” and booing every time the party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s name was mentioned. There was something of a pantomime atmosphere as the folk villains of the moment were named from the podium, to loud boos from the crowd massed outside Dublin’s grand neoclassical Custom House. Taoiseach Simon Harris, Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman, Justice Minister Helen McEntee were all met with boos and shouts of “Get them out!” from the crowd, as a speaker vowed to “clear that cesspool of a Dáil out”. So did Gardaí head Drew Harris, a controversial Northern Irish appointment “who learned his craft well with the RUC”, as the independent MEP candidate Malachy Steenson, a Dublin solicitor and former candidate for the Republican-Socialist Workers Party, told the crowd. “We are the risen people,” he declared, “and we have it within our power to change this society forever. And if we don’t take this opportunity in June, well then it’s over. Don’t come back whinging and saying ‘we should have done something’. Get out in June and make that change.”

Yet it is unclear whether the widespread popular dissatisfaction over migration will actually make an electoral impact. Recent polls show that Sinn Féin’s support has grown in recent weeks, while the different parties presenting themselves for popular acclaim in Dublin are competing for the same enthusiastic but not necessarily large voter base. The Midlands-Northwest constituency for the European elections alone is running 10 different anti-immigration candidates, while Dublin shows an equally crowded roster for a narrow vote share.

Insofar as the Irish press has covered these parties — which is not very far at all — very little effort has been made to analyse their platforms outside the immigration question. Yet while sharing the same podium, and making a show of unity against what they see as a hostile matrix of government, media and NGO lobbies, the parties competing for the popular anti-immigration vote represent a wildly differing policy mix, from the libertarian and anti-EU stance of the Irish Freedom Party, the largest party in attendance, to the continental-style Identitarianism of the National Party, standing on a “remigration” platform and railing against “global capital” from the stage. The Sinn Féin breakaway party, Aontú, the only immigration-sceptical party with a seat in the Dáil, and standing on a socially conservative, social-democratic platform, was not in attendance. Significantly more Left-wing than the Right-wing parties with which Irish leftists often bracket it, Aontú is perhaps the best positioned for an electoral breakthrough, and is now a regular staple for soundbites on the Irish television news.

“I’m sure that once this election is out of the way, there will be a reconfiguration, an amalgamation of various parties,” Hermann Kelly, the sharply-suited leader of the Irish Freedom Party told me. In Kelly’s eyes, the opportunity is there for the taking: “Within the last six months, there’s been an absolute sea change in that a nationalist consciousness has started to rise again in Ireland,” he said. “Look at the polls, 79% of Irish people have had enough of mass immigration. So the political class are still mouthing the same words, but the people out there on the doors are all telling them we’ve had enough. Hey, we never consented to be colonised. Ireland is different from Britain in that we were never a colonial power, never colonised anyone else’s country, and we don’t expect it to be done to ourselves.”

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Standing on a diametrically opposed platform to the Irish Freedom Party’s long-term goal of leaving the EU is the radical-right National Party, whose new leader, the farmer James Reynolds, recently ousted its unsettling founder Justin Barrett. Barrett, given to approvingly quoting Hitler and wearing an SS uniform at protests, has in turn created a new, more or less openly fascist party, Clann Éireann, while running against Reynolds in the Midlands constituency on the same National Party ticket due to a convoluted internal feud. “We’re not pro-Brexit, we have a very different outlook to the British,” Reynolds told me. “And I think that Hermann Kelly’s outlook is as much fixated on leaving the European Union as it is on doing anything disruptive to change it from within, which is my intention. I believe there’s going to be a huge Right-wing surge in the next European elections. I want to be part of it. I think I can achieve much more within the European Parliament than if we were outside.” Citing his links with Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party and Hungary’s Mi Hazánk, Reynolds’s National Party represents the Irish wing of a European Right-wing political strand quite absent from Britain.

Yet even still, Irish liberals and Sinn Féin activists are wont to describe the nascent Irish Right-wing as a British plot. While the tortuous logic of this claim does not bear much scrutiny, what was instead most striking was the degree to which the protest was framed within the language and symbolism of Irish nationalism — indeed, it arguably represents a Rightward shift in the long and historically very politically diverse Irish nationalist tradition, which has in recent decades tilted the other way under Sinn Féin’s leadership. “We fought the Brits for 800 fucking years, and we beat them,” one speaker bawled at the microphone to loud cheers, “and we’ll beat these fucking cunts too.” Protestors waved the Irish Republic flag of the Easter Rising and sang along to Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of the rebel song “The Foggy Dew”, as speechmakers quoted Patrick Pearse, alluded to the ancient Irish tradition of aisling poetry, lamented the loss of the Irish language, and referenced the rebel justice mechanisms of the Civil War period: one speaker declared his wish to “appoint local people as justices” to “arrest all the traitors”.

At the same time, Steenson declared that the Irish government’s recent attempt to blame the migration crisis on Sunak’s Rwanda plan was populist misdirection. “They’re “trying to play on the old prejudices against the British government,” Steenson told the crowd. “They’re trying to get us to blame the Brits for the immigration problem in this country. The British government are doing what the Irish government should be doing… What they should be saying to Rishi Sunak is: when your plane takes off from whatever airbase in England, keep a few seats on it, land it at Baldonnel [airbase near Dublin] and we’ll fill the rest of those seats.”

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After the protest, Steenson, a Eurosceptic, described to me his hope to “reunite our country as a sovereign state — the sovereign Irish Republic… free from all imperialist powers, whether it’s Britain, Europe or the United States or anywhere else. We will determine our own destiny.” But asked whether he saw the protest movement translating into electoral success, Steenson was more equivocal. “I suppose we’ll know the answer to that on 8 June. There are a lot of people standing, and I think that the stronger candidates will prevail, hopefully,” he told me. “We know who stood with us, and we know who stood against us.”

Yet Monday’s protest, while large, was perhaps smaller than the organisers had hoped. While a significant majority of Irish voters support immigration restrictions, the degree to which the energy of the largely social-media-based protest movement can actually make an electoral impact remains, until next month, an open question. Some candidates, such as social media influencer Gavin Pepper and radio talk-show host Niall Boylan, command large audiences, yet as Reform’s performance in Britain’s council elections shows, an outsized media platform does not necessarily translate into electoral success.

The Euroscepticism of candidates like Steenson and Kelly’s Irish Freedom Party is also a marginal position in Ireland, a country whose urban economy has rocketed as the European tax home of American corporations, and whose sizeable farming constituency is largely dependent on European subsidies. To British eyes, more radical parties such as the National Party are remarkable for the degree to which their slogans are accepted by the essentially “normie” crowd — yet they are so far without any electoral representation. If Monday was an attempt by the aspiring leaders of the movement to gauge the turnout they can command, June’s elections will provide the answer as to whether it can reshape Ireland’s political system, or remain a loud and angry voice shut outside power. While Dublin’s anti-immigration marchers vastly outnumbered the pro-migrant counter-protestors, it is Ireland’s voting majority, sitting quietly at home, who will determine the country’s political future. And for all that Monday’s protestors revile them, Sinn Féin remain by far Ireland’s most popular party — and seem destined for power.

Mr Hand was at first informed that his daughter had been killed, then told by the Israeli army that they now believe Emily is in fact alive and being held in Gaza. He appealed to Hamas at least to release its child hostages, to “have some humanity, some pity”. His daughter turned nine without him last Friday: he must now pin his hopes on the successful outcome of the newly forged hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.

On a brief trip to Ireland recently, Mr Hand appealed to Irish politicians for any help they could give. Both the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Tánaiste Micheál Martin pledged their support in the strongest possible terms. Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin, also expressed sympathy, saying that “the trauma and heartbreak being endured by this family is unbearable. I reiterate my condemnation of the taking of hostages and again reiterate our clear demand that hostages be released immediately”.

There is considerable sympathy in Ireland for Mr Hand’s situation, even as the public is appalled by the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza. But the plight of a young Hamas hostage of Irish-Israeli heritage is delicate territory for Sinn Féin. It has long been highly vocal about the Palestinian cause, and has had a number of contacts with Hamas over the years with an ostensible view to “furthering the peace process”. In 2020, for example, Sinn Féin hosted an online event — introduced by Mary Lou McDonald — featuring Palestinian speakers, including representatives of Fatah and Hamas. They included Dr Basem Naim, Hamas’s head of international relations, who joined from Gaza. Following the events of October 7, it was Naim who repeatedly told a clearly flabbergasted Sky interviewer that Hamas hadn’t killed any Israeli civilians.

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Even as news was first leaking out about the horrors Hamas had enacted upon Israeli civilians, Sinn Féin’s youth wing, Ógra Shinn Féin, was assiduously tweeting about the historic crimes of Israel. Ms McDonald has herself condemned the Hamas attack, but has repeatedly called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, Dana Erlich, over Israel’s bombing of Gaza. At the annual Sinn Féin party conference earlier this month, the Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, was met with a standing ovation and shouts of “Free Palestine!”.

Yet this tension runs deeper, too. While McDonald is no doubt sincere in her calls for Emily Hand’s return, the past activities of the Provisional IRA, and her own role in commemorating and defending the organisation, cast an ineradicable shadow over present events. On October 9, she said that “the targeting of civilians and the taking of hostages is to be condemned outright”.

But is it? Not, it seems, if targeting civilians, taking high-profile hostages, or simply “disappearing” people has been sanctioned by the IRA Army Council.

It is unfortunate timing for McDonald that the detail and consequences of PIRA tactics in the Seventies and Eighties are very much in the news recently. Last Saturday, the Irish businessman Ben Dunne Jr, the former director of Dunne’s Stores, died aged 74. Prominent Irish politicians spoke warmly of the deceased: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described him as “larger than life”; McDonald tweeted that her “thoughts are with his beloved family”. It’s fair to say Sinn Féin’s thoughts weren’t primarily with his family back in October 1981, when Mr Dunne was abducted by masked IRA gunmen on his way to open a new supermarket in Co. Armagh; he was released a week later, reportedly after the payment of a very large ransom.

Compared to many other IRA kidnappings, however, Dunne’s had a happy ending. Many others didn’t, not least for the families damaged irrevocably by their trail of violence. A new book, The Kidnapping, by the Irish journalists Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy, tells the grimly dramatic story of the IRA abduction of the Quinnsworth supermarket executive Don Tidey in November 1983. Mr Tidey was driving his 13-year-old daughter Susan to school near his Co. Dublin home when he was flagged down by someone he thought was a policeman. In fact, it was an IRA man, whose associates shoved young Susan Tidey to the side of the road — along with her brother Alistair, who was driving the car behind — and abducted Mr Tidey at gunpoint, seeking a £5 million sterling ransom.

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By Aris Roussinos

Garda intelligence eventually tracked his IRA captors down to a place called Derrada Wood in Co. Leitrim and mounted a rescue operation. During it, two agents of the state were killed by the IRA: Gary Sheehan, a 23-year-old trainee Garda, and Patrick Kelly, a 35-year-old Irish Army soldier and father of four. The eldest of Private Kelly’s sons, David, later described the catastrophic effect of his father’s murder upon the family: his vulnerable mother remarried a controlling man who took them all to England, where they endured poverty and domestic violence: “we had fallen a long way in a short few years.”

In 2020, McDonald said of the IRA’s violence: “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign.” David Kelly then asked her to condemn his father’s murder outright: when pressed, she owned that particular IRA killing, of an Irish soldier, was “wrong”.

Which killings, then, were right? Sinn Féin culture — which McDonald plays an enthusiastic role in upholding — is one of frequent, sentimental commemorations for “fallen volunteers” whose deeds are clothed in hazy euphemisms of “liberation struggle” and “active service”. It falls to others to document the brutal generational trauma which PIRA visited on the families of its victims.

Among the most harrowing are those cases in which an abduction was simply followed by silence, causing untold agony for relatives. Last week, the sixth search for Columba McVeigh was called off after failing yet again to uncover his burial site. Columba was a 19-year-old Catholic boy from Co. Tyrone abducted by the IRA in 1975: the IRA spread rumours that he was an informer, which his family has strongly denied. But love is stubborn, and for nearly 24 years after he disappeared, his mother Vera clung to the hope that he was still alive. She and his father bought Christmas and birthday presents for Columba every year, in case he came home. Then, in 1999, the IRA at last admitted that their son was one of the “disappeared” whom it had murdered and secretly buried in unmarked graves. Vera died in 2007 without ever knowing where Columba’s body was.

Thomas Niedermayer was another civilian who never returned home, after two men knocked on his Belfast front door just after Christmas in 1973, saying there had been an accident involving his car. His daughter Renate answered the door and fetched her father, who went out in his house slippers to take a closer look at the problem. As the recent documentary Face Down by the Irish director Gerry Gregg searingly records, it was the last time anyone in the family saw Niedermayer alive.

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A married father of two daughters, Niedermayer was the well-respected German director of the Grundig plant in West Belfast, employing both Catholic and Protestant workers. Unluckily for him, the factory shop steward for a time — with whom, his former secretary recalls, he occasionally clashed — was a man called Brian Keenan. By 1971, Keenan was the quartermaster of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. It appears he bore a grudge towards his former boss.

No one outside the IRA knew what had happened to Niedermayer, or who had taken him. His wife kept pleading to know his whereabouts, but myriad false rumours — deliberately planted — swirled around her husband’s disappearance, talk of affairs and gun-running. Then, seven years after he had vanished, thanks to a tip-off from an IRA informer, his body was discovered by police, buried face down in a fly-tipping site in Belfast’s Colin Glen.  

The plan had been masterminded by Keenan, the informer said. It was intended to use Niedermayer as a bargaining chip with the British government for the return to Northern Ireland from England of the IRA bombers Marian and Dolours Price. On the third day of captivity, however, Niedermayer had made an escape attempt and was so brutally beaten by his captors that he died.

Much of Face Down is narrated by Niedermayer’s brave and dignified granddaughters, Tanya Williams-Powell and Rachel Williams-Powell. They are the only ones left to tell the story, because the murder took an almost unimaginable toll on the family. Mr Niedermayer’s wife Ingeborg, and their daughters Renate and Gabriele, all took their own lives by different means in the years after his death. So too did Gabriele’s husband Robin, in 1999.

The architect of the kidnapping, Brian Keenan, lasted quite a bit longer. In the IRA his tactical ruthlessness led him to be regarded as a figure of immense authority. He certainly seemed to impress the up-and-coming Mary Lou McDonald, eager to bolster her republican credentials after arriving in Sinn Féin from Fianna Fáil. In 2003, she appeared publicly alongside him at a commemoration for Sean Russell, an IRA man who died of a gastric ulcer in 1940 while on a German U-boat, having requested and received assistance from Nazi Germany to mount a proposed invasion of Northern Ireland. In 2008, after Keenan died from cancer, McDonald carried the coffin at his funeral. He is commemorated annually, with party members encouraged to join the Brian Keenan Mountain Challenge, a Sinn Féin fundraising walk.

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With Sinn Féin now the largest party in Ireland, there is a distinct possibility that McDonald could be Taoiseach after the next election: her brand of confident outspokenness and vigorous indignation on grass-roots issues appeals to that large section of the Irish electorate which is disenchanted with the failings of the political old guard.

Yet the memory of Provisional IRA violence cannot be consigned to the past — as many would no doubt wish — in large part because Sinn Féin doesn’t want that to happen. The party is not interested in apology: it doesn’t crave forgiveness, but vindication. It doesn’t wish to forget Provisional IRA violence so much as to rewrite it, to repackage what was brutal, heart-breaking and squalid as something radical, exciting and heroic to a generation that never experienced the reality of the Troubles.

In so doing, Sinn Féin is steadily propelling the Republic of Ireland towards a kind of heightened internal battle of self-definition. There can be no easy reconciliation between those who seek to document Ireland’s gritty reality and those who energetically promote Sinn Féin doctrine: the portrait of the Provisional IRA and the Troubles that arises from The Kidnapping and Face Down is simply incompatible with the Sinn Féin narrative in which Gerry Adams or the late Brian Keenan are morally unimpeachable Irish patriots. And so the argument has become no longer simply about what Ireland does, but what Ireland is. Who is the true guardian of the nation’s identity: those who would commemorate the late Irish soldier Patrick Kelly, or those who would honour the organisation that killed him?

One can sense this deepening anxiety in the statements of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leaders. In September, after watching Face Down, Micheál Martin said that Sinn Féin was “infecting a new generation of young people” by “trying to triumphalise the horrible deeds” of the Provisional IRA. Leo Varadkar said recently that the idea of a Sinn Féin justice, foreign affairs or defence minister was “repugnant to me” given the party’s refusal to “acknowledge war crimes that may have happened in this country”. That is unusually strong language to use about an opposition party in a Western democracy, but the rift it signifies will only grow more intense. Part of that will be because — as we see now with the Middle East — the debate around other conflicts persists in holding up a mirror to Ireland’s past.

Hesitantly at first, then loudly, the crowd sang God Save The King, clapping and waving their own flags. “We’re part of the Loyalist Shankill Road, you’ll not get a place anywhere that’s more loyal to the crown,” Janet McGregor, a middle-aged woman wearing a slightly unsettling King Charles mask and coronation robes told me. “We had to fight hard to stay part of being Britain, so we did, whereas those over there now [in Britain], they don’t seem to care. Look at Scotland, trying to get away. Until the death, isn’t that right? You’ll have to kill us first.”

But the passionate attachment of working-class Loyalist communities to the United Kingdom and the monarchy, so exotically performative to mainland eyes, is not reciprocated by Westminster. The Conservative party relied on the support of the DUP, the province’s largest Unionist party, to push Brexit through, but Brexit has had the unintended consequence, for many Unionists who supported it, of bringing down their own devolved government and further isolating Northern Ireland. On the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a poll revealed that 62% of Unionists oppose the return of devolved government until Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol is completely scrapped.

But London wants to move on, and is increasingly impatient with the DUP’s refusal to return to Stormont, warning that abstention from power sharing is “the biggest single threat to the union”. In an effort to restore the relationship between Westminster and Brussels, the Sunak government recently deployed the new king’s regal stardust to obtain the Windsor agreement, a ploy condemned by the DUP’s Nigel Dodds as politicising the monarchy, and resented by local Loyalist activists.

“The Windsor agreement is the Belfast agreement [Good Friday Agreement] renamed, it’s the same,” Julie Davidson of the ACT NGO, created to integrate former UVF paramilitaries into civilian life, told me, “and that was a blindside to put that Windsor in there. People in the community feel exactly the same as me, it’s a failed agreement. I voted for the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago, but would I do it over again? No. Bring the whole lot down.”

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If power sharing resumed in Stormont, Sinn Fein would lead Northern Ireland’s government as the country’s largest party, as King Charles himself affably noted to Sinn Fein’s Vice President and Northern Ireland leader, Michelle O’Neill. The oddly warm relationship between the King and the republican leader is remarkable, not least because his own beloved uncle was assassinated by the IRA. Yet Charles has worked hard to advance normalisation between Britain and Ireland — his 1995 visit to the Republic was the first official visit by a royal since the country’s independence, laying the groundwork for the Queen’s historic 2011 visit — and it may already be paying dividends.

“I’m very proud the way he’s met with Republicans,” Janet’s friend Jacqueline told me beneath the mural, “I’m proud that he done that. It showed them’uns [Nationalists], I’d love them’uns to take their seats in the House of Commons, if they’re genuine about trying to move on, that’s something that would have to be asked.” Yet Charles’s outreach to a Nationalist community which rejects his role has already met with new reciprocation from Sinn Fein, eager to position itself as the natural party of government for all of Northern Ireland. Michelle O’Neill’s surprise announcement that she would attend the coronation — as a mark of respect for Northern Ireland’s Unionists — was well received by some Loyalists gathered under the mural. “I feel sorry about the hunger strikers’ families to be honest with you,” says Jacqueline. “Them people died for their cause and the next minute she goes away to London and wants publicity for votes.”

Indeed, it’s perhaps O’Neill’s own Nationalist powerbase that looks most sceptically at her attendance of the coronation. On nearby Northumberland Street, the Peace Gates — the optimistically-named metal barriers built to keep the two communities apart — divide the Protestant Shankill from the Catholic Falls Road. Murals to dead UVF volunteers and the fallen of the First World War Ulster Division suddenly give way to memorials to dead republican militants and lurid expressions of support for various Third World liberation movements. At the An Chultúrlann centre, an Irish-language cultural hub, Gerry Carroll of the Republican socialist People Before Profit party told me that O’Neill’s attendance was a misstep. “Somebody who classes themselves as a democrat should not be endorsing and entertaining the most reactionary elements in British politics,” he told me, “so I think it’s a real shame that Michelle O’Neill and others have endorsed that rotten institution. As soon as they offered that, it wasn’t enough for the DUP, they were clamouring for Union Jacks on every public building, so Sinn Fein are conceding ground to the DUP and others’ narrative.”

On West Belfast’s Catholic Divis Street, two PSNI officers sat bored in their parked patrol car watching an anti-coronation protest stretched out along the road. Pádraic MacCoitir, former Republican prisoner and organiser for the far-Left nationalist Lasair Dhearg faction, was giving a speech railing against the “imperialist rule” of a “parasite” king, but reserved his greatest ire for Sinn Fein. “Twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, we find ourselves faced with the spectacle of two former Republicans standing in front of a king, acting as Viceroys of Empire,” he told the 50 or so demonstrators, waving red flags and placards saying “Not Our King” in Irish and English as beeping cars rushed past. “Their presence is an endorsement of the very forces that oppressed and terrorised our people for centuries, this is a betrayal of everything that we have fought for.” But asked whether his anger was shared in the wider community, MacCoitir was more equivocal. “Well obviously Sinn Fein, politically — you can see all the posters about — they’re very strong,” he told me. “It’s wrong what they’re doing, it’s completely and utterly wrong. But will it affect them in the forthcoming council elections? I don’t know. I really don’t care to be honest, but it could. Who knows?”

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But it’s unlikely that Sinn Fein, now the largest party on both sides of the Irish border, will be electorally troubled by O’Neill’s gesture: if anything, it marks a growing confidence that history is on their side. Back on the Shankill Road, there’s a weary sense that Northern Ireland’s Nationalists are now on top, have better PR and London’s ear. The sight of Sinn Fein’s leadership seated so prominently at the ceremony highlights that the party has now become, in its own way, part of a Westminster establishment whose authority it doesn’t formally recognise. “The Republican movement seem to have better spokespeople and people [in Westminster] are more sympathetic towards them,” Matt, a drinker in the Shankill’s Rex Bar, bedecked with Union Jacks and portraits of the king, told me. “I don’t think it matters if it’s a Conservative government or a Labour government, if it suited them, they’d do away with the six counties and be happy with a united Ireland, they see it as a burden. It’s like an unrequited love, it doesn’t matter what we do, we’re taken for granted and ignored.”

This sense of disaffection will only grow as Northern Ireland braces for savage cuts in Government services to fill an £800m budget black hole. Already the poorest part of the United Kingdom, with the country’s worst transport infrastructure and longest NHS waiting lists, now the province’s Department for Infrastructure is warning it will be forced to limit road maintenance and turn off street lights to save money. The greatest perceived trump card for the Union, Northern Ireland’s superior public services to the Republic, are now threatened by the looming budget cuts, the effects of which will further entrench political divisions within Unionism over power sharing. With the DUP blocking Stormont, and the Unionist vote divided over the way forward, even on the Shankill there’s a grudging respect for Sinn Fein as efficient political operators.

“The streets here is alive with rats, them politicians knock on your door for votes and then you’ll never see them,” Steven, a young local, told me as he puffed on a cigarette outside the Shankill’s Royal Bar. “I’ve seen people in Shankhill Road going to Sinn Fein for housing problems, because at least they’re working, and they seem to resolve the problems. I’ve known many Protestant people go down to Catholic councillors to resolve their problems, it’s shameful to be doing it but it’s the only way.” Steven’s friend Nicola, an NHS worker, agreed. “There’s no government here,” she told me, “I’ve never seen Belfast so run down. Why are we paying for them to sit at home? We’re all working and they’re getting paid for nothing, and now they’re going to turn off our street lights.”

Divided between those who want Stormont restored and those who want it abolished entirely, working-class Unionists in Belfast are on the back foot, and increasingly disillusioned with Northern Ireland’s dysfunctional political system. For all that the coronation provided an opportunity for the community to coalesce and demonstrate their passionate attachment to the Union and the monarchy, their fractured politics leave them voiceless in Westminster, and an irritation to a British Government whose reciprocal loyalty seems ever more uncertain. O’Neill’s presence at the crowning of the man she hopes will be Northern Ireland’s last king was also a coronation of her own, establishing Sinn Fein as the province’s next party of government, and reframing Loyalist attachment to the monarchy as a harmless cultural quirk of a people she is destined to lead rather than a meaningful political identity. In Northern Ireland, so misleadingly similar to mainland Britain and yet so utterly different, the glittering spectacle of the Coronation took place in a Westminster that looks to be moving ever further away.

The focal point of the protests is Dublin’s East Wall, where, in November, after the government converted a state building into a migrant residence without consulting locals, hundreds of people started to gather week after week. By December, the demonstrations spread to other areas — Drimnagh, Finglas, Ballymun and Fermoy. Rather than losing steam as each month went by, the protests continued to intensify, sprouting across the country. And as they did, it became clear that they were different from other anti-migrant demonstrations in Europe.

Last month, a group of 300 anti-migrant protestors clashed with a smaller counter-protest outside the Shelbourne Hotel in central Dublin. The demographic profile of each faction revealed something curious. As one might expect, the anti-migrant protesters were from the working-class areas where the migrants are being housed, while the counter-protesters were largely middle-class liberals. More surprising, however, was the significant proportion of women among the anti-migrant contingent.

One of the principal motivating factors behind Ireland’s anti-migrant protests concerns a number of reports of migrants mistreating women and even young children. Last week, for instance, a male migrant allegedly walked into Temple Street Children’s Hospital and announced that he wanted to rape children. This week, a migrant was charged by the Gardai with the sexual assault of a teenage girl.

A few days earlier, unfounded rumours circulated about a migrant from a camp in Finglas sexually assaulting a woman. The impact of such incidents is borne out in national polls: in one recent survey carried out by The Business Post, only 38% of women supported building new homes for migrants, compared to 55% of men. As The Irish Independent noted: “The view that Ireland has taken in too many refugees is notably stronger among women in working-class communities.”

If true, the government’s official depiction of Ukrainian women and children fleeing war and persecution doesn’t seem to be taking hold in the minds of voters. And the reason for this seems straightforward: it ignores a surge in non-Ukrainian asylum seekers piggybacking off Ukrainian sympathy. The Business Post recently reported that “the number of international protection applications in the first half of last year had gone up by 200% compared to an average increase of 25% in such applications across the EU”. Elsewhere, the government’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth reported that, of the roughly 20,000 non-Ukrainian asylum seekers, 50% are single males. In other words, there is a glaring dissonance between the Government’s official depiction of women and children fleeing the Ukrainian war and the observed reality of suspicious young single men from non-Ukrainian countries rapidly increasing.

In any other European country, such a scenario would be ripe for a Right-wing populist party to make electoral headway. But Ireland’s modern political landscape has no equivalent to Le Pen, Orbán, or Trump. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have ruled Ireland for a century. The former positions itself as more traditional and working-class, and the latter as more secular and pro-business — but, by and large, they govern identically. Over the past decade, as any legacy of Right-wing attitudes dissipated from the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, anti-establishment angst had channelled itself into support for the rising Sinn Féin party — to great success. Under the slogan promising “time for change”, the party’s first-place position suggests it will take control of the government in the next election. Unless, that is, the anti-migrant protests overshadow Sinn Féin’s rising star.

These working-class protesters are the same demographic as Sinn Féin’s reliable voter base. As Dublin City University Professor Eoin O’Malley discovered after polling individual issues, “Sinn Féin support is correlated with anti-immigrant sentiment”. Meanwhile, The Business Post poll referenced above indicates that while 75% of Fine Gael and 71% Fianna Fáil supporters believe that only the far-Right oppose taking in refugees, that figure dropped to 45% among Sinn Féin supporters.

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This anti-immigrant sentiment contrasts starkly with the Sinn Féin party leadership, which perhaps explains the three-point drop from its all-time high last June. It is noticeable, for instance, that the East Wall protests were actually located in Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s constituency. A number of placards showed a photo of McDonald with the words “Traitor” written across it. Similarly, protests in Finglas singled out the local Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis for condemnation.

Amid such a politically hostile climate, Sinn Féin’s detachment from its anti-migrant working-class base is starting to open the door to something modern Ireland has never experienced: Right-wing populist parties, the most prominent being the Irish Freedom Party (IFP). Led by Hermann Kelly, an ally of Nigel Farage, the IFP has primarily campaigned for an Irish exit from the EU since it was founded in 2018. It should be stressed that it remains on the margins of Irish politics and is yet to register any serious uptick in the polls. But Kelly and the IFP are starting to position themselves as the party of the protestors, and it seems unlikely that they won’t be listened to. At the recent Shelbourne Hotel protest, for example, IFP Chairman Michael Leahy gave a prominent speech, no doubt hoping to encourage former Sinn Féin voters to switch to his party.

For his part, Malachy Steenson, the anti-migrant protests’ unofficial leader, appears willing to give the IFP a chance. Steenson, a solicitor with a history of advocacy in the broad republican movement, has maintained neutrality on any specific party monopolising the protests but frequently speaks alongside IFP members at demonstrations. In 2021, he gave a speech at an IFP demonstration, while last June he attended the IFP Ard Fheis (annual party conference), where he was photographed next to Kelly and Leahy. While Steenson might not officially label himself as part of the IFP, and is always referred to as a “guest” when he appears at their events, he is certainly friendly with them.

Of course, whether this translates into meaningful change remains unclear. The IFP’s challenge will be to turn this spark of popularity into a political machine. Can the IFP recruit the popular Steenson to run on its behalf? Can the party field enough candidates across many localities? Does it have the bureaucratic nous to conduct a campaign and, eventually, state operations? Can it appeal to voters less persuaded by its core objective of leaving the EU to increase its numbers?

These questions are yet to be answered, but it is not inconceivable that the energy of the anti-migrant protests will converge around the IFP. Perhaps the next election won’t mark IFP’s ascendence — but if conditions stay the same or deteriorate, Sinn Féin could find itself staring at an exodus of voters for whom Right-wing populism is suddenly palatable.

Michael Leonard, Joseph’s cousin, was shot dead by Royal Ulster Constabulary police officers on 17 May 1973. The day before we meet, 40 of Michael’s friends and family had gathered at the spot. Flowers were laid. A small cross was erected. There was wistful talk about a criminal investigation.

“That’s it just there,” Joseph says quietly, half-motioning for me to pull over. For the past 30 seconds he has been anxiously clenching and unclenching his fists. “Michael was alone when he died,” Joseph says. “His mother had sent him out from their home in Pettigo to fetch dinner from the shop on the other side of the border.”

Michael’s crime was to drive without a licence. The police later claimed he had refused to stop at a checkpoint that, it later turned out, didn’t exist. And so they pursued him until, 200 metres from the border, an officer leant out of his Land Rover and fired his gun. Michael was 24-years old. He was due to get married that summer. After that: a family and a career as a cattle dealer.

“Michael’s death was a tragedy,” Joseph says. “But it’s just one tragedy in hundreds. There are too many to be forgotten. Everyone here knows someone who was attacked.”

***

Carelessly sitting astride the Termon River, Pettigo remains shy about being the only village on the island of Ireland to be divided between the North and the Republic. There is no painted line on the two bridges that connect Counties Fermanagh and Donegal. There is no gift shop. Just a ramshackle Customs Post, its shamrock paint turned to rust, and a statue dedicated to the memory of the four young men who died “fighting against British forces in 1922”.

“Like rats in a trap!” was the verdict of one British newspaper after the Battle of Pettigo and Belleek. Pettigo had been partitioned for just over a year when the IRA moved in, a hundred years ago this week. The British responded with artillery shells, machine guns, trenches and bayonets; they recaptured Pettigo after 12 days. It was once again split in two, doomed to become a front in Ireland’s internal conflict — and a plaything for politicians who view a “hard border” as an acceptable means to end it. Today, you can buy an envelope with euros in the village shop on the Donegal side, cross the river, and post it with a stamp bought from the Post Office with sterling.

Mervyn Johnston’s garage is perched on the Fermanagh side of the river. It was a theatre for the IRA’s season of bombings in 1972. A former part-time soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he was a walking target. Now 83, he knows he’s lucky to have survived. “We had two major bombs and three or four incendiaries,” he tells me. “Oh, and I’ve been shot at.”

Mervyn was sitting on the far side of the workshop when a man came to the door with a box, shouted that it was a bomb and demanded everyone leave. “I was having a cup of tea and thought it was all a joke. But then another chap came in with a gun and took us outside and lined us up against the wall.” The gunman started to ask for names. “Now, I had two lads working for me at the time who were also called Johnston, and I was second in the line and knew that if I gave a wrong name and these lads don’t, one of them is going to get shot.”

So Mervyn told the truth. “The next thing I know there’s a gun pressed to my forehead — a .45 revolver.” When the trigger was about to be pulled, Mervyn quickly ducked; the bullet missed him, ricocheted off the wall and hit one of his apprentices, though not fatally. “Before they could react, I ran off and they fired a few more shots after me. They’re just lucky I didn’t have a weapon on me.”

Did you have one nearby? “Oh yes. I went round and got my SMG [submachine gun] and fired a few rounds at them while they were driving off.” I ask him if, after all the attacks, he still feels the need to look over his shoulder. “The thing is, back then, there was never any problem here with the locals. The attackers came from a long distance away. Even after everything, I would still go across the river to have a drink in the pub.”

***

At Britton’s Bar that evening, Rangers are about to lose the Europa League final on penalties but no one is watching. We are talking about the explosions that pummelled Mervyn’s garage in 1972 when Triona Britton, the landlady, describes how she was almost killed during an attack that July. She disappears upstairs and reemerges clutching newspaper reports from the days after the attack. “Pettigo Baby Narrow Escape,” reads one headline. “I was fast asleep in my cot when the bomb exploded,” she explains. Slabs of concrete and slivers of steel from the car carrying the bomb fizzed through the air. “One piece of shrapnel ripped through the venetian blind and lodged itself in the wall right next to where I was sleeping,” Triona says.

Three men start to discuss their memories of 1972. “It’s a generational thing,” Frank, 39, says. “Speak to the older men and women, and their memories will be of the bombings. But it’s different for those of us who came after. They had the bombs; we didn’t. I was the first generation to be given the chance to go to an integrated school.”

Is this why younger people, more distanced from the horrors of 1972, are less concerned with the current debate over scrapping the Irish Protocol? “Many people here don’t care about the Protocol,” he replies. “There are more important things for them to worry about.”

***

To understand these worries, go to Belleek. A 20-minute drive away from Pettigo, the border village prides itself on the ceramics produced by its pottery: you can buy a hand-crafted ice bucket for £4,200. Seven weeks ago, a food bank opened.

“We were asked to come by the district council,” its organiser, John, tells me. “Things have definitely got worse in the past few months. The price of everything has gone up. The only thing that comes down is the rain.”

Northern Ireland, like the rest of the UK, is staggering through a cost-of-living crisis. But while Westminster, Holyrood, and the Senedd make a pretence of trying to fix theirs, Stormont remains silent. It’s been over a fortnight since Sinn Fein took control of the Northern Ireland Assembly. But what do they have to show for it? A handful of photos from victory night; a few half-hearted appeals for a border poll. And that’s it. Northern Ireland’s latest political revolution hasn’t even made it out of its wrapping paper.

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With the DUP refusing to elect a Speaker to the national assembly until the Protocol is scrapped, the region faces months — perhaps even years — without a functioning executive. Until that changes, close to £500 million that could be spent on easing the ongoing crisis cannot be touched. In a county such as Fermanagh where the average wage is £23,000 — 12% lower than the average for Northern Ireland — that absence stings. This time last year, a quarter of children here were living in poverty. Nobody doubts that figure has increased.

“You look at our politicians and feel despair,” John says. “Hardworking people are being forced to go hungry, while their politicians don’t turn up to work and still take home their wage.” He tells me to head to Newtownbutler to see local poverty at its worst. “Since the start of April, we’ve had 18 different families start using the food bank there. And that number is only going to go up…”

***

On 19 August 2019, the Troubles returned to Newtownbutler. Police and soldiers patrolled the fields surrounding the village; surveillance aircraft hovered in the grey sky. A local newspaper had been tipped-off about a bomb being planted. The device was found and turned out to be a hoax, but a second explosive was hidden nearby. When it detonated, nobody was injured. Politicians in both Sinn Fein and the DUP condemned the attack. Then they looked away.

The Lanesbourough Arms Hotel, with its two-story bar, guards the crossroads at the centre of Newtownbutler. It opened in 1820 but now, like almost half the buildings slumped on either side, it is decomposing. Its windows have been smashed in; paint flakes off the walls. Peer through the broken glass and plates are still stacked neatly in the kitchen; an old telephone gathers dust on a shelf; a plastic Christmas tree is garlanded with baubles and dust. Nobody has pulled a pint there since 2004.

Maureen Murray shuffles past the Lanesborough whenever she can afford to buy food. “Everything is getting more expensive by the minute,” she says. “But what can we do? We’re all living on the breadline now. Everybody here worries about whether they’ll have enough food on the table next week.” Then she points to her walking stick: “I’m a bomb victim. I’ve always had to struggle.”

It was an October evening in 1972 when the car containing three men drove slowly into Annaghmore, on the border between Fermanagh and Monaghan. Maureen, then 21, looked on with her two siblings as one of the occupants threw a device through the village shop’s window. Unaware it was a bomb, Maureen and Raymond ran towards the building to make sure its owner hadn’t been injured. When the device exploded, Maureen was thrown into the air. Blinded in one eye and with a shattered leg, she has been unable to walk without a stick since. “My brother died by my feet,” she says. He was 24, the same age as Michael Leonard.

“I’m supposed to be receiving some extra money because I’m a bomb victim, but that doesn’t look like happening.” She explains how everything’s been held up by Stormont. “People are talking about that Protocol, but why does that matter if we’re struggling to feed ourselves? Everyone round here uses the food bank. It has become a fact of life.”

Around the corner, Elizabeth and Vincent have picked up their two-year-old daughter. She sleeps in her pram, oblivious to her parents’ anxiety. It is Thursday, and they are dreading the weekend: “By the time it comes, we often have nothing,” says Elizabeth. “It’s normal for us to have a fiver or tenner to spend between us and the three kids [aged between two and seven]. The foodbank is really helpful, but it doesn’t solve everything. When our kids ask for more food, we have to tell them to leave some for tomorrow or the next day.”

Vincent reels off the realities of inflation. “The prices of milk, nappies and wipes have gone up by 10p in no time,” he says. “Then there’s the price of fuel: it’s £1.79 for diesel over here. We can’t even afford to drive to the supermarket anymore.” Elizabeth stops rolling her pram back and forth. “The food, the petrol… Fucking everything is going up.”

And what if that doesn’t change? Silence. “I don’t want to think about it,” Elizabeth eventually says. “We’re just about keeping our heads above the water as it is.” Vincent grimaces. “Our politicians are doing fuck all at the moment to help us.”

In a region without a functioning government, where every politician seems to care more about a Protocol passed by accident than whether a family can feed itself, it’s hard not to conclude the same. In England, the politicians are useless. In Brussels, they’re intransigent. In Stormont, they don’t exist.

But this isn’t a story about the Protocol, or Brexit, or the prospect of a united Ireland. It is a story about politics — and what happens when it’s turned into a vacuum; when indifference becomes institutionalised and ordinary people are left to pick up the pieces. During the height of the Troubles, the authorities betrayed you by shooting you in the back as you drove down a country lane. Today, they just let you starve.

He told me how the Unionist authorities had tried to counter that higher birth rate by encouraging Catholic emigration through discriminatory housing and employment policies. Generally, those authorities were successful: Catholics disproportionately left Ulster and thus their share of the population held stable, with higher arrivals of babies being offset by higher departures of working-age people looking for opportunities on the British mainland and the US. But sometimes these policies backfired.

“One friend of ours went to the housing office to ask for a bigger house,” my Sinn Féin interlocutor remembered. “They said: ‘Come back when you have eight children.’ So he did.”

Once civil rights improved the lot of Catholics in Northern Ireland, their disproportionate departure from the Province ended. But their birth rate remained significantly higher than that of Protestants for a few decades more, laying the foundations for a growing share of the population. 

A roughly 2:1 Protestant advantage was baked into the Partition — indeed, Cabinet papers make it clear that this was the basis on which the border between Northern Ireland and the Free State was drawn. But in the closing third of the 20th century, that Protestant advantage began to erode, and a rough parity of numbers between the two communities came into sight.

Numbers matter in ethnic conflict. As long ago as Biblical times, the Pharaoh of Egypt fretted about the number of Israelites in his realm. In an era of democracy, those who wield the greater number of boots on the ground also wield the greater number of crosses on ballot papers. One way or another, power tends to derive from numeric predominance.

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But how to establish numeric predominance? Broadly, it can be undertaken through what experts have named “demographic engineering” — that is, changing the demographic facts to suit one side or another in a conflict. This can be done the “hard” or “soft” route. Hard demographic engineering means causing people to be born, or to die, or to move. History is replete with examples of these practices,  and so is the contemporary world. Higher Catholic birth rates on the one hand, and the encouragement of higher Catholic emigration in Northern Ireland is just one example. In Ceausescu’s Romania, an ethno-nationalist regime with a merely superficially Communist-internationalist veneer, ethnic Romanians were deprived of access to contraception in order to boost their numbers, while ethnic Hungarians found it easier to get hold of family planning devices. Ethnic Romanians were not permitted to leave, while Jews and ethnic Germans were traded for hard currency. The result was a more homogeneously Romanian Romania.

Subtler ways to tilt the scales of ethnic composition exist. This is soft demographic engineering — like the drawing of the Irish border to exclude three traditionally Ulster but too-Catholic counties from the northern state. The population balance in Northern Ireland was arranged without moving or massacring anyone, and without encouraging one group to have larger families than the other. 

Elsewhere, the very borders of the United States were shaped by demographic considerations. After victory over Mexico in 1848, the US decided to annex the northern portion of the country — today’s California, New Mexico, Arizona and the rest of the south west — and not the rest of the country precisely because in this large part of Mexico, there were hardly any Mexicans. The administered territories were not admitted as full states until they had reliably “Anglo” majorities — New Mexico not until 1912.

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If the boundaries of a map can be manipulated for demographic purposes, so can the boundaries of identity. At one stage the Turks tried to persuade the world that the people living in the east of the country were not Kurds but “Mountain Turks”. Austria-Hungary was keen to stress the Ukrainian identity, serving as a thorn in the side of the Russians. The Russians meanwhile, along with their Balkan allies, were busy trying to persuade Croats, once loyal to the Habsburgs, that they were really “South Slavs” (or Yugo-Slavs) who should throw their lot in with the Serbs, religious differences notwithstanding. The Tsarist authorities preferred that Ukrainians thought of themselves as “little Russians”, a theme Putin himself has echoed.

In Northern Ireland there has been little effort to persuade Nationalists that they are really British, or Unionists that they are really Irish, but there is a fair amount of this sentiment in both communities. Soft demographic engineering has occurred regardless. Undoubtedly conversion and assimilation on both sides is what explains Republican and Nationalist leaders with names like Wilson and Hume, and Loyalist terrorists with names like Murphy. 

However the two sides have played their demographic hands in the numbers game, there is no doubt that they are closely watching the results. Catholics have been making headway; although their fertility rate is now not much higher than that of Protestants, the historic gap is still delivering them a growing share of the population. Sinn Féin certainly has high hopes that, in Gerry Adams’s words. “demographic dynamics… make Irish reunification a realistic objective within a reasonable time scale”. Earlier this year, one commentator suggested demography as the leading reason why Irish unity was “inevitable”. But Adams and the inevitabilists may turn out to be disappointed.

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The great Catholic advantage in fertility has decreased significantly. Recent censuses have shown a declining Catholic share of younger cohorts. And a great many Catholics who feel part of the Nationalist community and probably vote for Nationalist parties are quite content in the UK and — or at least until Brexit — would not have voted for unification in a border poll. 

There is evidence that the binary nature of Northern Irish society is breaking down. Despite the persistence of inner-city sectarian citadels, more people are ceasing to define themselves as members of one tribe or the other, either because they have lost the strong sense of identity with which they may have been brought up, or because they hail from outside the Province. All this plays to unionism with a small if not a large ‘U’, because few such people are eager for a change to the status quo. One prominent Unionist politician told me that he would love a few thousand Hong Kong Chinese to emigrate to Ulster for that very reason. Note how the rise of the Alliance party has meant that, at these elections, parties committed to Irish unity actually lost four seats.

Brexit did complicate Northern Irish politics, but even its effect is waning; one recent poll showed only 30% in favour of unification. There is no doubt that support for unity is much stronger among the young than the old. But just as with radical change in the socio-economic order, changes to the constitutional order are likely to get less appealing as people age, and the support of youth today does not necessarily translate into support for it among the middle-aged tomorrow. Scottish independence, like Brexit, may change the equation, but not necessarily decisively. More than twice as many Catholics as Protestants admit to having changed their minds on the issue of Irish unification.

Sinn Féin’s electoral triumph changes none of this. There is a long precedent of nationalist or separatist parties holding local power over a long time but failing to achieve their break-away ambitions and in some cases even abandoning them; examples include places as diverse as Scotland, Quebec and Tamil Nadu. 

There can be no doubt that the rise of the Catholic share of the population has assisted in the growth of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland and – alongside Unionist divisions – accounts for the party’s success in becoming the largest party in the Province. But demography is not always destiny. The IRA could not deliver Irish unity through the gun. Sinn Féin will be disappointed if they believe they can deliver it instead through the womb. 

For the first time in the history of Northern Ireland, a party representing republicans and nationalists has won the largest number of votes in a Province-wide election. This, in many ways, is a startling result. So too are the advances made by the Alliance Party, gaining from disillusionment within unionist ranks, as the larger parties buckled under the pressure of events. In particular, the poor performance of the DUP in the face of the challenges posed by Brexit negotiations has been damaging to its brand of hard-line unionism.

Northern Ireland was created in 1920, and its borders were confirmed in 1925. The inclusion of six counties within this newly formed jurisdiction was intended to ensure a comfortable unionist majority. A possible nine-county option, which was entertained at the time, would have given unionist voters a bare edge. On the other hand, a mere four counties, which was also considered, would have rendered the unionist homeland scarcely viable. As things came to stand in the six-county unit at the outbreak of the modern phase of the Troubles, the electorate was divided into a 60-40 split between unionist and nationalist voters.

From 1920 to the present day, a higher birth rate among nationalist voters along with a lower volume of emigration has meant that the disproportion between the two sides has been eroded. This election result is a vivid illustration of the implications. And the current trend is set to continue. In the last Northern Ireland census completed a decade ago, the Protestant population made up 48% of the voting public. Catholics, by comparison, stood at 45%. Historically, religion has been a predictor of party affiliation, with Protestants inclined to vote for unionist parties, while Catholics have tended to choose nationalist representation.

The issue, however, is not merely one of party strength. The parties in Northern Ireland are not just divided over policy matters. They are also split in their fundamental allegiances. Sinn Féin and its supporters are committed to joining the Republic, while the unionist parties are determined to maintain the status quo.

But the outcome will not be decided by elections. It will be determined by a referendum, with provision for such a plebiscite built into the legal architecture of the Good Friday Agreement. This states that a mere 51% percent of the population is entitled to determine sovereignty over the territory. Should a vote be triggered, the status of Northern Ireland could be legally redefined. The North could be brought under the jurisdiction of the South.

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Since the last census in 2011, the gap between the rival electorates has continued to narrow. Experts predict that by 2030 there may be a majority of nationalist voters. In any case the direction of overall travel seems clear. It is true that there is no certainty about how a nationalist majority might vote. At present there seems little appetite for a border poll. Nonetheless, given the latest electoral result in Northern Ireland, it is clear that the situation is likely to evolve. We might therefore reasonably expect some degree of planning, or at least an informed debate among interested parties.

Before the election, Sinn Féin had been playing down the deeper significance of the impending shift for fear that expectations of fundamental change might reduce their appeal. This caution may soon recede. Just as the party has steadily increased its strength in the North, it has likewise gradually advanced its position in the South. It is currently more popular than any rival party and may before long be able to form a government.

Yet despite its popularity, Sinn Féin has failed to offer a positive vision of the future. Its main focus has long been on defeating its historic adversaries, which it has pursued with due application and ruthlessness. However, as a party of government it needs to develop a wider perspective, inclusive of its opponents as well as supporters. So far, it has offered nothing to the unionist population, still more or less half the inhabitants of the region. This is exactly what nationalists complained about when unionists ran the old Stormont regime.

There is certainly no inevitability about future outcomes. Nonetheless, as the decades pass, a united Ireland looks increasingly plausible. This should cause some serious rethinking on all sides. Instead, the actors are rather haplessly being carried along by events. John Finucane, Sinn Féin’s director of elections, recently declared that “only unity” could hope to unlock the potential of the island. This is a case of being blinded by heady optimism. Meanwhile, in the South, there is no agreement on the possible character of a new republic. Equally, there has been little examination of the likely costs.

Still more obvious problems are evident in the North. Among the DUP in particular, there is a refusal to confront reality. This obstinacy has its roots in unionist tradition stretching back to the years before partition. Historically, unionist allegiance has taken the form of dependence. Their representatives have looked to Britain to secure their position, usually with a mixture of anxiety and bluster. The reason for the anxiety is clear: dependence can only be happy if both sides share the same objective. Yet this has not been the case between Britain and Northern Ireland.

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The asymmetry is now more obvious than at any time in the Province’s history. Prior to the election, the DUP campaigned to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol, which governs its economic relations with the European Union. Under its strictures, customs arrangements in the six-county area are distinct from those that operate in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Despite fierce opposition to these unwanted Brexit clauses, disaffected unionists have been unable to bring about change. In fact, as if to humiliate the largest unionist party, the day before the election Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, made plain his government’s reluctance to suspend the Protocol. With a single utterance, a minister of the crown exposed the structural impotence of unionism.

There is a pathological dynamic in operation here. Unionism has banked upon unreciprocated loyalty. But the British establishment has no real commitment to maintaining the Union with Northern Ireland, a fact which undermines the bargaining power of unionism. At the same time, many unionists are blind to the looming crisis around them. Typically, this has encouraged empty swagger instead of dispassionate calculation. It is, then, strongly in unionists’ interest to change their strategy going forward. A start might be made by building new alliances in the North. The recent success of the Alliance Party in expanding its horizons could offer lessons to more hidebound unionist mentalities.

Further progress might be made by collaborating with the South. For instance, unionists could open discussions about the future of cross-border arrangements. In the process, they might canvass new opportunities for rapprochement. They could start by underlining the cost of reunification. The crucial point is that there are substantial pockets of opinion in the South that are determined to counteract the inexorable rise of Sinn Féin. Unionists are sure to find confederates among them. This kind of partnership is surely more promising for the unionist cause than the bitter mistrust that has characterised their dealings with British governments.

The DUP, who were especially enthusiastic for Brexit, were among those who shouted loudest. They even got a lot of money from somewhere to put a pro-Brexit ad in Metro, which some said was a tad fishy. The DUP pushed back: it was a UK-wide election so they were entitled to place ads in paper that’s not distributed in Northern Ireland. When asked, they refused to say where the money came from.

After the Brexiteers’ triumph, years of negotiation between the UK and EU revealed, as predicted, that a “new” border on the island of Ireland would be a bit of a problem. Reports of the endless wrangles clogged the airwaves and made not a few, certainly in England, just wish the Irish problem could be sorted, so the poor old UK, God bless her, could just move on! Ah, moving on: the catchphrase of those rank with self-pity when they have to deal with the consequences of their actions.

In Ireland we didn’t have that luxury. We knew the problem wouldn’t go away. Even members of the DUP knew that. Their solution — and once you know this was always their goal, then everything they’ve done vis-à-vis Brexit makes complete sense — was the restoration of the old border, the one established post-partition in 1922; the one that lasted until 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement stripped it of its check points and watchtowers.

This border was not a rip-roaring success, yet this was what the DUP and the European Research Group stalwarts wanted back. If you don’t believe me, check out Liam Fox on BBC R4 on 1 January 2022: in an interview he stated that Brexit restored the UK’s control over its borders and, as a newly sovereign state, the UK could and should re-establish the Irish border.

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Northern Ireland has little hope left

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Not everyone here in Northern Ireland, of course, is singing from the DUP hymn sheet. For this is still nominally a democracy. And the Brexit vote was not a sectarian matter: a straightforward case of Unionists voting Leave and Nationalists voting Remain. Many progressive Unionists voted Remain because they saw their future in Europe. And there were certainly some Catholics and Nationalists who reckoned they were better off cleaving to the devil they knew, perfidious Albion, rather than throwing their lot in with the pesky Europeans.

But post-2016, as the wrangles rumbled on — as the bitterness between the UK and Europe deepened and hardened; as Mrs May’s government floundered; and as the DUP, boosted by supplying the Tories with a coalition of sorts after the disastrous 2017 election, strutted their stuff and talked up the hardest of Hard Brexits — one began to notice something unexpected in Ireland. Since the referendum, EU membership had become a sectarian matter. Generally speaking, Catholics, Republicans and Nationalists favoured Europe; Protestants, Unionists and Loyalists did not. This is the crucial context of the Stormont Assembly election, on Thursday.

Northern Ireland was designed so that there would always be a Unionist majority. But for various reasons, that majority has been declining. There are now more non-unionists than Unionists in Stormont. But the DUP is still the largest party, so it was from their ranks that the last First Minister came, while the deputy First Minister came from Sinn Fein’s ranks.

The roles of First and deputy First Minister have equal heft, but in the DUP’s eyes their candidate being the ‘First Minister’ re-asserts and anneals what they need to believe. They are the top dog: the natural party of government in Northern Ireland. But now, it appears (if the polls are to be trusted) that Sinn Fein are about to become the biggest party in Stormont. A Sinn Fein candidate (probably Michelle O’Neill) will likely be First Minister.

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And though that may be bad, a Sinner First Minister, what’s worse is what comes next. Sinn Fein obviously want a border poll: they are committed to Irish Unity and a border poll is the only way to make their wish come true. A poll is entirely in the Secretary of State’s gift; might the obdurate Tory Brandon Lewis grant Sinn Fein their wish, if they have a First Minister in place? The signals coming from the Tories suggest not, but we all know (the polls again confirm this) that many Tories would love to be free of the albatross of Ulster. And if the poll is granted — and it’s a big if — then the Brexit farrago really comes into own.

Those who don’t want unity will trot out the old arguments. Irish government bad, British government good; Irish health service bad, NHS good; Dáil Éireann bad, Westminster, the mother of Parliaments, good. They will also play the Brexit card: “Look at the division it’s caused, let’s not repeat the mistake.” Covid will be referenced, too. “Look how the four home nations stood shoulder to shoulder to defeat the coronavirus,” the Unionists will chorus.

And the pro-Irish Unity arguments? The unity case, traditionally, was always all about repairing an ancient wound, restoring a damaged island to its healthy whole. But post-Brexit, the argument Sinn Fein and the nationalists are going to mount won’t be the old one about gluing two bits of a broken place back together. They will dwell on the fact that, in the event of unity, Northern Ireland will be re-joining Europe. Remember: we voted by a clear majority to stay in Europe in the 2016 referendum.

Our politics may not be totally binary, yet, but as an argument to get people (especially the undecided and the unsure) to put their X beside “Yes” on a unity poll ballot paper, the idea that a United Ireland means forward into Europe looks pretty good. The other side’s vision of a future still shackled to the UK, and the Tories and Johnson, out of Europe, doesn’t look quite so hot. The Sinn Fein case certainly looks better to me, at least.

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Still, with Republicans (at this moment of writing) my conversations are muted, at least on their side. It is patently obvious they’re incredibly anxious not to be seen as being triumphalist. They are within touching distance of a border poll and must not let the opposition see how pleased they are.

But they are very pleased. Last time there was a border poll, in the Seventies, it was a boycotted by nationalists and Republicans, who argued there was no point participating in such a poll when Northern Ireland was an artificially created state with a Protestant majority. However, next time will be different. Next time there will be no boycott. Republican organisations will present a united front, working together to achieve their goal. And they have precedent here: when that side of the house pulls together, they can achieve miracles, like the election of Bobby Sands.

Everyone here knows that Blighty is a fickle lover — and that there is a strong constituency in Britain that would be more than happy to slough off Northern Ireland. It demoralises Unionists, and that therefore helps the United Irelanders in turn. But at the same time, counter-intuitively, the Tory government is introducing legislation that will reinforce the border and Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom: yes, coming down the track there is a new law that will require all EU citizens barring Irish ones to have an ESTA before they enter Northern Ireland from Ireland. If they enter Northern Ireland from Ireland without an ESTA and they are caught, the punishment is four years in jail. This, too, empowers Republicans.

When I talk to nationalists (some of whom, like me, are considering voting for the SDLP this Thursday) about the future and what might happen in the event of the unity poll, what I meet is concern. They are worried about how this is going to play with unionists and loyalists and Protestants. They want a united Ireland, yes, but they also want to find some way of doing this that will not terrify the people with whom they share this place. They want evolution rather than revolution.

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Seamus Mallon was one of the great articulators of this strand of thinking: his idea that one has to treat the “other” side with tact and care and sympathy has strong support. Those who vote for the Alliance Party (middle-class people like me; I have voted for them in the past) also believe in this idea strongly but are uncertain about how and if unity will work in practice. Alliance used to be a moderately unionist party, but now positions itself as on neither side of the fence. I don’t know if Alliance supports a United Ireland in theory and I live here and that’s the problem.

I don’t blame Alliance, though. A lot of progressive or liberal Unionists vote for them and too much talk of unity might put those people off. They might be driven into the arms of the Ulster Unionists or the DUP or the TUV, the really hardcore Unionist party who are busily stealing the DUPs clothes and snapping at the heels and fraying their vote.

When I talk to unionists and loyalists, especially of the pro-Brexit variety, what I meet is anxiety. They know the English, or the British, are not constant and committed. They know the Republicans have the capacity to mount an effective campaign in a unity poll, underpinned by a positive story about rejoining Europe and marching into a glorious future of lovely coffee houses and trams in every city centre.

What is notable, at least to me, is how their rhetoric has changed in step with changing circumstances. In the olden days, the pro-Union arguments relied on such old favourites as, for instance, the appalling roads in the south and the poor nature of Irish governance. In the 21st century, this won’t wash anymore. The roads in the south (largely thanks to EU money) are actually better and less potholed than roads in the North and Irish governance is formidable. The Irish health service didn’t do too badly during the Covid pandemic, which is something many in the North, where the NHS is a shibboleth, are chary of admitting.

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The new anti-unity rhetoric, which I hear coming from unionists and loyalists, is all about Europe. The EU is now categorised as an enemy who wants to swallow us up using the Irish Protocol (which allows Northern Ireland to remain in the single market though the UK is out of the EU) as it’s Trojan horse. When I hear this kind of talk I find myself wondering if I’m back in the 18th century, only instead of Louis XVI, the enemy is now Ursula von Der Leyen; but then as we often say in Ireland, “To hell with the future, let’s get on with the past.”

Unionists have another fear. Even if the Republicans lose the unity poll, should they get one, they will have no truck with the idea of it being a once-in-a-lifetime poll, just as Scottish Nationalists won’t accept that their 2014 referendum was a one-off. If there is an Irish unity poll and it is lost, it will be followed by another poll a few years later, and then another poll a few years later again, until the right result is delivered.

Yes, this is what those who wish to maintain the union believe is the future. They’re frightened, and frightened people are apt to agitate and push for things that are reckless. And so, among some unionists and most loyalists, there is fidelity to the crackpot idea that the United Kingdom should trigger Article 16 and junk the Irish Sea Protocol and just put the border back where it always was.

Even if the Tories secretly wish to jettison Northern Ireland, they might do this, if they thought it would be to their advantage. We do seem to live in an age when the world is upside down and in which rulers appear to have little or no compunction about upsetting the applecart and making a bad situation worse. Meaning that everyone in Ireland — from quietly confident republicans to extremely anxious unionists — is afraid that something is coming, after Thursday’s election, that they aren’t going to like.

Books of condolence were opened in numerous cities. Politicians from all sides voiced their deep regret. It moved the world, to see this representative of an apparently post-Troubles Northern Ireland — a young, gay, working-class Catholic woman with many Protestant friends — cut down by something that had darted out of the shadows to re-assert what many outsiders assumed had disappeared from the political scene: the fanatical pursuit of a united Ireland by means of violence.

Lyra herself hadn’t been much of a cheerleader for either side of the border argument: she wrote in 2014, “I don’t want a united Ireland or a stronger Union. I just want a better life.” By 2019, in personal terms, life had indeed got much better since the days when she was a lonely, unhappy teenager, bullied for her emergent sexuality. She had a partner, a successful career as a journalist, and a two-book deal with Faber. Politically, however, Northern Ireland was in much worse shape than many might have hoped when the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998 — something Lyra was acutely aware of. Her articles circled the dark psychological legacy of the Troubles, including the high suicide rate among the generation who grew up after the Agreement, many of them trapped in pockets of deprivation and neglect where violence still held sway.

In her last essay, published posthumously in the Guardian, Lyra skewered the bargain made for her generation, or at least how it had played out: “We were to reap the spoils and prosperity that supposedly came with peace. In the end, we did get the peace — or something close to it — and those who’d caused carnage in the decades before got the money. Whether they’d abandoned arms (as the Provisionals did) or retained them (like the Loyalists), they’d managed to make a ton of paper. We got to live with the outcome of their choices.”

The politicians had made three promises to sell the peace deal to the Northern Ireland electorate, she said. The first, peace itself, they “barely delivered on”: paramilitaries may have stopped murdering “the other side”, but they quickly began “terrorising their own” with renewed vigour in working-class communities, something that barely excited attention outside of Northern Ireland. The second promise was prosperity in a thriving new peacetime economy, one which failed to materialise for most younger people. The third failed pledge, she said, “was the one that hurt the most”, and was felt mostly in the areas where “the gunmen continued to roam”. The politicians had promised that “the days of young people disappearing and dying young were gone”. As everyone knows — not least Lyra’s own family — they weren’t.

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Three years on, Lyra McKee’s analysis of the way in which her generation had been let down remains, sadly, accurate. Northern Ireland required a unified, determined and highly thoughtful approach to rebuilding a civil society: it never got one. The British government bolted unionists and nationalists together in the oddly-constructed power-sharing Stormont administration, and then retreated with great relief, intervening like a distracted parent only at moments of crisis and collapse.

The concessions granted to paramilitary organisations in order to broker the Agreement — such as the release of republican and loyalist prisoners from jail — were not seen as one-off gestures, after which authority would clamp down hard on paramilitary activity and its routine glorifications of a murderous culture. Instead these concessions became a template for a new, politically tentative approach to paramilitarism, which has uneasily endured for almost 25 years.

Its central tenet appeared to be that so long as the loyalist and republican paramilitaries avoided explicit acts of sectarian violence, and refrained from bombings and shootings outside Northern Ireland, they should not be overly antagonised at home: their working-class fiefdoms would effectively remain their own, “policed” by bullets and brutal beatings doled out to troublesome youths, or those who simply defied bullying.

A series of post-Agreement IRA murders of young Catholic men, from Andrew Kearney in 1998 to Paul Quinn in 2007, were politically overlooked. Sinn Fein politicians frequently commemorate what Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill calls “our freedom struggle” in terms which gloss over the squalid reality of IRA killings. Flags of the Ulster Volunteer Force — responsible for some of the most grotesque sectarian murders of the Troubles — have been put up sporadically in mixed Belfast housing estates, no doubt intended to intimidate Catholic residents. Despite the valiant efforts of many small-scale community projects aimed at building reconciliation, the self-laudatory nature of former and current paramilitary organisations has persistently worked against building an idea of Northern Ireland as a “shared” place.

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Loyalist paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, are meanwhile securing their finances by means of extortion, intimidation and the drugs trade. And republican “dissident” groups such as the New IRA and the Continuity IRA are embroiled in criminal activity while also pledging to continue with their violent campaign for a united Ireland. It doesn’t seem as if the PSNI’s Northern Ireland Paramilitary Crime Task Force, set up in 2017, is going to be retired any time soon.

If the current paramilitary scene is a volatile mix, with a fair amount of money and arms sloshing around in it, the bad news is that the wider politics is far from steady either. Indeed, the strongest feature of Northern Irish politics since 1998 has been the steady erosion of its middle ground, with the more centrist unionist UUP and nationalist SDLP losing out to the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively. Sinn Fein, which includes many prominent former IRA members, is currently on course to be Northern Ireland’s largest party after the May 5 elections — as well as Ireland’s richest, its slick electoral machine oiled by nearly £4 million left to it in the will of an eccentric Englishman, William Hampton.

Ulster unionism has perhaps never, in living memory, felt itself so precarious. A long spell of devolution has eroded bonds with the — nominally — Conservative and Unionist party, leaving unionists with few other political allies in the UK. Nor have DUP politicians served their own cause well: narrowly focused on small gains, their reputation as canny political horse-traders has too often been undermined by an acceptance of limping nags tricked up for market-day. The most notable was an early acquiescence — later rescinded — to Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan involving a degree of “regulatory divergence” for Northern Ireland, sold by their Prime Minister with fervent assurances that a customs border in the Irish Sea would happen only “over my dead body”.

The customs sea border is now long established, under the Northern Ireland protocol, and Johnson is very much alive. Perhaps no other British Prime Minister would have been so reckless as to amputate one part of the UK from the rest and believe that the consequences would be negligible, but the deed has been done.

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The IRA's hunger for martyrs

By Jenny McCartney

For the moment the political pain is largely experienced by unionism, and it is growing more intense, as are the arguments between the unionist parties over how best to oppose the sea border. There have been attempts to overturn the Protocol in the courts, but the most recent judgement by the Court of Appeal was that it “lawfully modified” the 1800 Acts of Union and could stand. A series of local rallies have been held to emphasise public anger against the legislation, but they have drawn little attention from London. Westminster had been sabre-rattling towards the EU about triggering Article 16 to suspend Northern Ireland customs checks — but with the British government preoccupied by Ukraine and its own rolling scandals, this rhetoric has grown notably quieter.

The loyalist paramilitaries — who, like their republican counterparts, view violence as the ultimate means of political conversation — are growing restless. Earlier Brexit proposals, involving some form of “frictionless” land customs border with the Republic of Ireland, were later shelved in no small part because the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar energetically emphasised the risk of a return to republican violence if a customs border were put in place. The loyalists are now clearly beginning to wonder if their violence is deemed to be of inferior quality, and pondering how they might put that right.

In a grim echo of the IRA’s campaign in England during the Troubles, they have begun to speak of threatening politicians and targets in the Republic of Ireland. To emphasise the point, the UVF recently put on a disturbing theatrical display during a visit of the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney to Belfast, by hijacking a van and using it to transport a hoax bomb to the event he was attending.

The wider unionist population has little time for such threats and theatrics, but it is nonetheless politically worried. A Sinn Fein First Minister in Stormont would be a symbolic defeat for unionism, especially when allied to the possibility of the party entering government in Dublin in 2025. The vision of an Ireland presided over by Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald — who has described the IRA campaign as “justified” — with the elder statesman Gerry Adams celebrating in the background, is one which horrifies even the most moderate of unionists.

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Northern Ireland has little hope left

By Carlo Gebler

It is far from a done deal, since older voters in Ireland remain wary, having a keener memory of IRA atrocities, and many in the other Irish parties are acutely conscious of the possible harm which a Sinn Fein government could do to a broadly successful state: in recent polls, Republican parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael regained a measure of electoral ground. Still, Sinn Fein success remains a distinct possibility: younger voters may be swayed by promises on health and housing, and the party’s bogus but strategic rewriting of the Provisional IRA campaign as necessary for “civil rights”.

The landscape in Ireland, North and South, is not what one would have hoped for in 1998, or even at the time of Lyra McKee’s death in 2019: an increasingly unmoored, isolated unionism, twitchy loyalist paramilitaries, a triumphalist Irish republicanism, and a democratic Irish electorate potentially sleepwalking towards installing a government organically linked to a long and bloody sectarian campaign.

And yet, in the thick of it all, the border is not the burning question for ordinary people in Northern Ireland that many might imagine: a recent poll found that only 30% would back the reunification of Ireland if a border poll were held tomorrow, with 45.3% voting against it. When they are asked what they want, Northern Ireland itself is a more settled entity than it often appears. Like any other voters, they are currently more preoccupied with the health service and the cost-of-living crisis; like Lyra, they “just want a better life”.

But Northern Ireland’s intensifying political situation now merits urgent attention from any British or Irish politicians who can co-operate to defuse it: chaos in Northern Ireland, after all, has almost never taken account of what ordinary people want.

Yet reconstitution of a fighting force would take some doing, not least because its recruiting ground, northern Catholics, are more prosperous and less easy to mobilise than their parents and grandparents were in the late sixties. And mobilise for what? Polls continually show that a majority do not want, at least not soon, a United Ireland — the IRA and Sinn Fein’s reason for existence. In any case, Irish nationalists of every stripe now see themselves as in the ascendant, and thus believe that political pressure and elections will bring nationalist majorities in parliaments, both in Ireland and in the North. This is similar to the belief held by Scottish nationalists: both groups have faith that youthful cohorts will support radical change – unity for Ireland, secession for Scotland – and will, when the cagey elders remove themselves, bring victory .

Nationalists believe that Ireland’s geography is destiny, and that unionists should see that the island has room for only one nation state. The view isn’t a Sinn Fein preserve: Simon Coveney the Irish Foreign Minister in the Fianna Fail government described its formation this as a “terrible mistake (which) caused extraordinary division”.

Behind this view, overtly or by implication, stand the Catholic Church, the European Union, all the Irish political parties and — at times the heaviest guns — American politicians with Irish forebears. They, from the Kennedys through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, have felt empowered to intervene in the business of the British government to secure a greater all-Irish dimension to Northern Ireland’s politics, a tendency not confined to American leaders of Irish descent, and one always couched in terms of securing better relationships and lasting peace.

With these centres of influence now must be counted most of the Irish commentariat and intellectuals — men and women who command space in the Republic’s newspapers, talk shows and opinion websites and blogs. The leader among them is Fintan O’Toole, a writer with a large Anglophone audience for his commentaries in the Irish Times, The Guardian, the New York Review of Books and beyond. His book, Heroic Failure (2018), pictures Britain in masochistic but rebellious submission to a Brussels dominatrix, a posture he believes had been deliberately prepared for by the well-timed publication of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011.

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What the SNP really believes

By John Lloyd

His visceral dislike of Brexit and by extension the present British state is amplified by other powerful voices, such as Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to the UK and a reliable defender of all the European Union does and says. They view the unionists’ Euroscepticism, and their anger at the Protocol which retains large EU control over their border with Ireland, as evidence of reaction.

The columnist Emma de Souza sees Protocol denial as “chest-pounding bravado and posturing”. Pat Leahy, the Irish Times’ political editor, believes Sinn Fein is a government-in-waiting — an increasingly common trope among Irish columnists. O’Toole, a long-time and continuing critic of Sinn Fein’s “amnesia” about the IRA’s decades of massacre, torture and crime, still believes that it should be part of a “progressive” government coalition. A large exception: Ireland’s most remarkable novelist, Colm Toibin, who in a Guardian column asked of the anti-British, pro-United Ireland/Sinn Fein crowd: “do they want to import sectarian hatred and the politics of perpetual grievance from the north into the south”?

Sinn Fein, at 32% in the opinion polls, is 10 points ahead of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, governing together in a unique coalition. Leahy salutes the party’s “waves of energy, commitment and conviction”.

For unionists, Sinn Fein is remembered as having other qualities. In his essay, the deputy editor of the Belfast daily News Letter Ben Lowry laments that IRA leaders, including the late Martin McGuiness, a former head of the Londonderry IRA, were not brought to any kind of justice for the many killings they ordered. He quotes Alan McQuillan, a former assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as noting that investigators face pressure from both the British and Irish governments “not to pursue those whose arrest would destabilise the peace process”.

The force and power of Irish commentary has spurred the unionist intelligentsia to a collective response. In a collection of essays out this week — The Idea of the Union — they give tongue to defiance of nationalists’ growing assumption that the territory’s time as British possession is up, and that unionists must sooner or later recognise it.

Thus two sets of highly educated, strongly motivated, radically conflicting groups lay out their respective stalls. On the Northern side, this comes with a painful recognition of a subaltern status. “Nationalism,” writes Arthur Aughey, among the most lucid of Unionist intellectuals, “can mobilise its friends and unionism has few or no friends — and, in the text of the present post-Brexit protocol, has been betrayed once more by those it believed were its friends” — in this case, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

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What if Ireland were united?

By Colm Toibin

Note the “once more”: it is an insistent theme in the essays, that unionists, the most demonstratively patriotic of all the national groups which make up the United Kingdom, should, over the long century of the province’s existence, have been so grievously disregarded by their own government. The political scientist Geoffrey Sloan highlights a Northern Ireland Office discussion paper of 1972 which insists that all policy on the province must reside within an “Irish Dimension” – instead, Sloan writes, “of defending the integrity of Northern Ireland’s territorial boundaries as part of the British state, a distancing process was set in motion”.

The historian Paul Bew, now a crossbench peer, notes that a “remarkable aspect” of the negotiations over the Northern Ireland Protocol was “the way in which the British government allowed the Irish government to control the narrative”. The former Northern Ireland first minister David (now Lord) Trimble writes that the Protocol , “rips the heart out” of the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, which set up a  government sharing power between the two main parties, Sinn Fein and the United Unionists (later the Democratic Unionists): “it does so by removing the assurance that democratic consent is needed to make any change to the status of Northern Ireland.”

Leo Varadkar, Taioseach until June 2020 and now Tanaiste (deputy prime minister) to Micheal Martin, is much blamed for being used by the European Union to pile pressure on the British. Ray Bassett, a former head of the Irish Consular Service and now a stern critic of his country’s policies towards Northern Ireland, accuses Varadkar of “misusing the border issue to maintain Brussels control… to display its euro credentials”.

Micheal Martin as Taoiseach has been more emollient than Varadkar: but the issue of the Northern Ireland Protocol prevents any serious softening. The deal, agreed in December 2020, was necessary for a quick agreement on the terms of Brexit, and keeps the movement of goods free from check between north and south, while erecting a new trade border with the UK — retaining the authority of the European Court of Justice over the arrangement, a clear diminution of British sovereignty.

Yesterday, the European Union revealed it would offer “far-reaching” reductions on the checks presently required on goods moving between the British mainland and Northern Ireland: but, in the negotiations to come, will be reluctant to reduce the ECJ’s authority, and thus the wound to Britain’s sovereignty. There is little hope that the Irish government will take the British side on this, or even use its good offices to bring about compromise.

Some of the essayists in The Idea of the Union seek to cut Irish claims down to size — none more forensically than the economist Geoff Gudgin, now an advisor to the Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, who by careful statistical accountancy shows that the Irish claim of possessing one of highest GDPs in Europe, substantially higher than that of the UK, is based on it being one of the greatest of world tax havens. All of the more than 20 writers, inflamed or moderate in their tone, insist on what they see as the core truth: unionism is not to be argued, seduced, persuaded or charmed with any greater success than it was terrorised away.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

It is a different culture: prepared to live in friendship (and often doing so, in Northern Irish communities) but not to have unity thrust upon them. If attitudes in the south have become more militant, those in the north have hardened round the old cry: “No Surrender”.

Irish intellectuals, as jealous of their independence as any other such national grouping, now line up with their government’s pro-EU, anti-Brexit, anti-Unionist themes. Katy Hayward, writing in the French journal Etudes Irlandaises, remarks that Irish intellectuals “play an increasingly “functionary” role in debates about “Europe”, in effect “supporting the official position of the Irish government without being given much scope for critiquing or elaborating upon it”.

They are not alone in this. The Scottish National Party enjoys the support of some intellectuals — such as Tom Nairn, the cornerstone of nationalist ideology through his diabolisation of England, the commentator Neil Ascherson and the academics Ben Jackson and Scott Hames. They are fleshed out by enthusiastic support from some English intellectuals: the novelist Will Self, the founder of Open Democracy Anthony Barnett and the writer Paul Mason. And it has nearly all the “creative” community behind it, including two novelists who won the Booker prize, James Kelman in 1989 and Douglas Stuart in 2020. This broad strand of opinion generally sees Irish unity as desirable, without violence if possible.

The well-worn observation of Orwell in England, Your England — that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality” — seems to remain substantially true, taking extra strength from the horror with which the intelligentsia, together with the bulk of the middle class, view Brexit. It is a horror which, much magnified, has given the Irish intelligentsia, and their governments, a new lease of anti-British life; and their Northern Irish unionist equivalents a tighter grip on their Britishness.

Of course, such candour has its advantages. But not in frontline politics — where, for good or ill, a different set of skills is needed to make allies and get things done.

And so it was hardly surprising that Mercer was unceremoniously sacked this week, after expressing anger at the Government’s failure to keep its promise to protect veterans of the British Armed Forces from facing prosecution for historic offences. Next week, two unnamed veterans will go on trial in Belfast for the 1972 murder of an IRA commander — the first time that British soldiers will be prosecuted for the alleged killing of an IRA terrorist.

Mercer was understandably frustrated; the Government had previously pledged that such a prosecution would never occur. Few sacked politicians can say they were dismissed for taking a stand on an important issue. Mercer, in that respect, is the exception.

For ultimately, it would have been far easier for Mercer to have taken the easy way out and turn a blind eye to the trial. The issue of historic prosecutions is an ethical and political nightmare, one which is very easy to put off — as successive governments have demonstrated.

Even when such investigations do take place, they tend to be far from fruitful. Take, for example, the probe into the killings in Londonderry in 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed. It gave rise to the longest and costliest inquiry in British legal history.

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Ulster's lost boys turn violent

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The Saville Inquiry published its findings in 2010 — a full 12 years after it was established — and found that a number of the soldiers present on the day fired in a way that was “unjustified and unjustifiable”. And yet, for the soldiers who took part, the Saville inquiry was of little utility. They were granted legal immunity from future prosecution so long as they told the truth. But a number of the soldiers — most notably the man known as Soldier F — perjured themselves in their attempts to whitewash their actions, thus leaving themselves open for future prosecution.

Not that anyone was in any hurry to do so. After Lord Saville’s report was published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced that it would begin a murder investigation into the killings. And there was a distinct sense of foot-dragging around the matter.

The PSNI announced that it would have to begin its investigations as though they were starting from scratch, implying that the incomparably detailed Saville report had no worth. It took almost a decade for them to decide to only prosecute one of the soldiers — Soldier F — for his actions on the day. Even now Soldier F only faces prosecution for two of the deaths he was most likely responsible for — much to the horror of the families of other victims, who are believed to have been killed by Soldier F.

Today, discussion surrounding Soldier F’s prosecution tends to be strikingly reductive: either wholeheartedly in support of the prosecution or in defence of the veteran.

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And on the face of it, it seems like a straightforward decision to make. Having watched Soldier F testify in 2003 — and written a book on the matter — I can say with certainty that he is a liar. He pretends to have no memory of what happened on that day because he knows that what he did was indefensible; he disgraced not just his regiment but his country. In any normal situation, it would be impossible to justify not prosecuting him.

But the situation in Northern Ireland is not normal — not least because prosecutions there have become a very one-sided affair. In order to secure the current peace arrangements, it was necessary to take decisions that would ordinarily be unconscionable. Most notably, the British government, led by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, carried out secret side-deals with the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein as part of the Good Friday Agreement. These included the assurance to unconvicted terrorists who were “on the run” that they would not be prosecuted for their historic crimes.

Blair and Campbell kept the existence of these letters classified, knowing full well that the British public would not be able to stomach them. Indeed, these “get out of jail free” letters remained such a secret that when John Downey was prosecuted in 2014 for his participation in the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park Bombing, the trial collapsed when the defence produced the assurances secretly given to Downey by the British government.

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Downey was as responsible for the Hyde Park Bombing as Soldier F was for Bloody Sunday — yet it is only one of these men who faces prosecution. And as a result, many believe there is a double-standard at play here: why should Soldier F face the possibility of being charged one day when a number of the terrorists Britain was fighting are able to walk free?

Certainly it’s a legitimate concern. But is this double-standard not defensible? After all, Downey was a member of a proscribed terrorist organisation, while Soldier F was a serving representative of the state. Surely a soldier must be held to a higher standard than a terrorist?

For the most part, that claim has a certain appeal, and if it were the case that the army still has lessons to learn from Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, then it might be more applicable. But it is almost fifty years since Bloody Sunday happened, and the inquiries into it — in particular the Saville Inquiry — have already established the many lessons that should have been learned. There has even been a Prime Ministerial apology for the actions of British soldiers on the day. What more is there to achieve?

Mercer, then, was right to condemn the Government for failing on its promise not to allow former servicemen to appear in court. But now that he is on the backbenches, perhaps he can put forward a more subtle argument that needs making.

For ultimately, even in the case of Soldier F, there is little need to condone or defend the historical actions of the few rogue British troops in Northern Ireland. That doesn’t mean whitewashing Soldier F for his crimes, any more than it means whitewashing Downey for his.

But either both men are in court or neither is. Make that case, and it’s up to Sinn Fein and their supporters to make the next move.

Take, for example, the discussion that emerged some weeks ago when Billy Hutchinson, the leader of a small loyalist party called the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), launched his memoir, My Life in Loyalism, with a number of press interviews. Hutchinson’s previous career was in the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary organisation — linked to the PUP — which was primarily known for brutal sectarian killing.

Hutchinson’s public profile rose in line with the ‘peace process’ and his support for a loyalist ceasefire. But back in 1974 he was convicted of a UVF double murder, in which he and another UVF man shot dead two young Catholic half-brothers, Michael Loughran, 18, and Edward Eric Morgan, 27. The young men were walking down the Falls Road on their way to work one morning when a car drew up beside them and gunmen opened fire. The court was told that the victims were selected at random for what were described by the judge as “cold-blooded murders”.

Hutchinson’s mention of his victims in his book, as reported by the Irish Times, is somewhat different. The men had, he said, been identified as “active republicans. How accurate the information was, I don’t know”. The passivity of the voice is striking, as is the ambiguity of “I don’t know”. Yet there was no indication whatsoever during court proceedings that his victims were involved in the IRA. They have never been claimed or commemorated by any republican paramilitary organisation.

Their cousin, only 12 years old when they were shot, later wrote Hutchinson an open letter in which he reiterated their lack of paramilitary involvement. In it, he movingly described the catastrophic shock for his family, and the few items that his cousin Eric left behind: a handful of albums — “Tubular Bells at the front” — and the little military pewter figurines he liked to paint.

Hutchinson has said that, “I accept responsibility for what I did”. So why continue to prolong a family’s pain by insinuating a political justification? Because the alternative is Hutchinson taking the consequences of his own action fully upon himself. This he refuses to do, despite arguing for the necessity of a peaceful future. In fact, he said as much in the recent interview with the Irish Times: “I justify everything that I did in the Troubles, and I have to do that to stay sane.” That, at least, comes close to an honest analysis of his own thought processes. But the wider question is: who in society pays the price for the preservation of Hutchinson’s sanity?

The UVF and UDA are still active in criminality in Northern Ireland. The PUP, however, is a very small player on Northern Ireland’s political scene: it currently has some councillors — of whom Hutchinson is one — but no representatives in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly. The same cannot be said of Sinn Féin, the party linked to the Provisional IRA, which has seven MPs in the UK House of Commons (from which it abstains), 27 seats in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly, and 37 seats in Dáil Éireann in Dublin. Indeed, the runaway success of the party in February’s general election in the Republic of Ireland — backed by many young voters, in particular — came as something of a shock to the Irish political establishment.

Once, voters in the Republic of Ireland were largely repelled by the party’s links to extreme violence. Today, many appear unbothered by that dark history, or might even consider that it adds a touch of radical spice to an otherwise bland democratic soup. That fresh acceptance has been enabled by a narrative — energetically propagated by Sinn Féin itself — which attempts to distance itself from the grotesque detail of IRA violence while simultaneously celebrating an airbrushed version of “the armed struggle”.

Although the image that Sinn Féin broadly chooses to project under its leader Mary Lou McDonald is that of a modern Left-wing, progressive party, campaigning on housing and healthcare,it occasionally flashes naked pride in its IRA past — as in February when David Cullinane shouted “Up The ‘Ra!” to celebrate his election as a Sinn Féin TD, or again last week when Brian Stanley, another Sinn Féin TD, tweeted gloatingly that the 1979 “narrow water” incident had taught the British “the cost of occupying Ireland”.

Stanley was referring to an attack on Warrenpoint by the IRA’s South Armagh brigade in which 18 British soldiers were killed, and over 20 injured. It took place on the very same day that the IRA blew up Lord Mountbatten’s fishing boat, killing him along with his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, the 83-year-old Dowager Lady Brabourne, and a 15-year-old schoolboy called Paul Maxwell who was working as a “boat boy” for the summer.

The deaths of two elderly people and two teenage boys that day were presumably also intended to school the British in — to borrow Stanley’s parlance — “the cost of occupying Ireland”. Like the soldiers at Warrenpoint, the small party on the boat fell under the IRA’s broad definition of “legitimate targets”, and their deaths would have been greeted with glee.

The collective memory of Ireland, North and South, is in the throes of an ongoing struggle between actual human experience, factual truth and political propaganda for dominance, in which great swathes of human experience and factual truth are being routinely downgraded, dismissed, insulted or selectively interpreted. That is where the role of the scrupulous historian becomes of great and immediate importance. The book Lost Lives, for example, an authoritative compendium of Troubles-related deaths, has long been considered an invaluable chronicle of the reality of that bleak time. Each individual’s death is accompanied by a short factual account which tells its own heart-breaking story. Neither the IRA nor the loyalist paramilitaries come out of it well.

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Sinn Féin's triumph is a victory of forgetting

By Jenny McCartney

Another important contribution to Troubles history has just been published, this time by Liam Kennedy, an emeritus professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. It bears the title Who Was Responsible For The Troubles? — a bold choice, since such a question presses directly on the inflamed nerve-endings of historical sensitivities, and has the potential to kick off the debating equivalent of a dust-up in a Belfast bar. Yet Kennedy — a Tipperary-born long-time resident in Belfast, who intimately understands the psychology of both North and South — goes through “the parade of candidates” with an admirable and forensic calm, painstakingly assembling the relevant facts and weighing the role of “both state and non-state actors”.

Much of this is directly relevant to Sinn Féin’s current attitude to the IRA’s past violence — which seems, in its carefully calibrated mixture of dogged justification and fuzzy regret, very similar to Billy Hutchinson’s attitude to UVF killing.

Earlier this year, Mary Lou McDonald said of the IRA campaign, “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign,” going on to describe it as “utterly inevitable”. As the years have gone by, and its electoral base in the Republic of Ireland has grown, Sinn Féin’s retrospective justification for past IRA activity has changed emphasis. Where once it was broadly accepted — including by Sinn Féin — that the IRA waged its armed campaign in order to bring about a United Ireland by force, the party now prefers to depict the brutal campaign as an unavoidable historical necessity in the fight for basic civil rights and freedoms for Catholics in Northern Ireland. This canny, if bogus, alteration serves two purposes: it is infinitely more palatable to a modern audience, and it also permits the party to slide past the uncomfortable fact that after a long and bloody conflict a united Ireland has not yet been achieved.

Kennedy’s book debunks that interpretation, although it does not gloss over Protestant sectarian bigotry and violence, disastrous early mistakes of the British Army, or the shortcomings of the Unionist-controlled Stormont government from 1922 to 1972. But he argues that significant changes were already well underway by the late 1960s, including “electoral reform, changes to policing, and reform of housing”. In a survey of popular opinion in the spring and summer of 1968, 65% of Catholics thought that relations between Catholics and Protestants were better than five years earlier.

The clear policy goal of the nascent Provisional IRA was a united Ireland won by force, he says, just as the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht vowed in February 1970: “We will erect the Irish Republic again in all its glory no matter what it costs.” The author’s contention is that the Provisional IRA’s long-term motivation was very far indeed from a civil rights agenda, not least when one considers the high numbers of Catholics that it killed and maimed in Northern Ireland. Indeed, he considers PIRA to have been the primary engine of the Troubles.

His view is supported elsewhere by a source somewhat closer to the republican heartland — Kevin Hannaway, a republican dissident who also happens to be Gerry Adams’ cousin, who remarked not long ago of contemporary Sinn Féin, “If they were out for an Irish Republic they failed. If they were out for civil rights they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”

In recent years, however, Sinn Féin has been extremely vocal on the case of Pat Finucane, a Northern Ireland criminal defence lawyer who was murdered by loyalist UDA gunmen in 1989 as he ate Sunday dinner with his family. Ken Barrett, a UDA member, was later convicted of his murder. An independent 2012 review of the case found evidence of collusion between Finucane’s killers and elements in the Royal Ulster Constabulary — for which David Cameron subsequently apologised — but “no over-arching state conspiracy”. Last week, the Secretary of State Brandon Lewis ruled out the full public inquiry demanded by the Finucane family – although he kept the door open for one in the future. This decision met with widespread outrage, including from the Taoiseach Michéal Martin and Amnesty International.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

It is justifiable and understandable that Pat Finucane’s family should seek information on his appalling murder. Historic state collusion with paramilitaries in Northern Ireland should be held to account where it exists. What is not justifiable is Sinn Féin’s own refusal either to express any genuine regret or disclose information on the murders of lawyers and judges by the IRA, of which there were very many: among them Edgar Graham, a young Unionist law lecturer gunned down outside Queen’s University; William Doyle, a Catholic judge shot dead as he left Sunday Mass; Rory Conaghan, a Catholic judge murdered in front of his young daughter; and Martin McBirney, a left-leaning magistrate, civil rights campaigner and literary figure who was shot dead in his family home at breakfast.

Sinn Féin is no longer a movement outside the state: it has long been part of the government in Northern Ireland, and it is actively seeking to become the government in the Republic. For how long can it argue its own right to repress and deny “legacy” information on the murder of citizens in Northern Ireland?

It is hard now, perhaps, to convey the impact of what families bereaved by paramilitary murders went through at the time of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. They had to accept that the killers of their loved ones would gain early release under its terms; in one instance, the parents of Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, the last soldier killed in the Troubles, had to witness their son’s killer, Bernard McGinn, laughing as he was sentenced to 490 years in prison for offences that also included making the Docklands Bomb, knowing he would be free in 16 months. Many of them accepted this because they believed it would bring an end to the sectarian killing that had destroyed their own families — and to a large extent it did.

Very few, however, had fully anticipated the degree to which former paramilitaries and their vocal supporters would come to dominate the political narrative in post-Agreement Ireland, whether in terms of media coverage or electoral success. The emotional comfort of former paramilitaries has been broadly indulged and preserved at the expense of those their organisations have bereaved.

Many of the bereaved have now taken refuge in privacy and silence. Some speak out from within victims’ groups or are active online, bringing their stories of loss to a wider audience. On platforms such as Twitter, I have seen a measure of the online abuse endured by courageous campaigners such as Ann Travers, whose 22-year-old sister Mary, a primary school teacher, was shot dead by the IRA during a 1984 attempt to murder her father, the judge Thomas Travers, as the family walked home from Mass. The icy statement from the Sinn Féin spokesman Danny Morrison at the time was that “Miss Travers’ death was regrettable but understandable as her father was a member of the British judiciary.” The party does not seem to have shifted fundamentally in its thinking since.

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That chilling “regrettable but understandable” over a young woman’s murder back in 1984 sits very close to Mary Lou McDonald’s “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign” in 2020. Or, indeed, Billy Hutchinson’s remark, “I justify everything that I did in the Troubles”. Yet any credible way forward for Ireland, North and South, must surely involve a genuine manifestation of respect for all those who lost their lives.

And if Britain is to re-examine the points where intelligence-gathering operations veered into criminal collusion, as it should, then the Republic of Ireland might also reflect on the degree of popular sympathy for the IRA in that jurisdiction, and the extent to which that funded and fuelled the murderous conflict in the North – a theme examined in a new book, A Broad Church by Gearóid Ó Faoleán.

Acknowledging and owning uncomfortable truths in history is a complicated and painful path for all parties, and so it should be. The best historians recognise this, I think, but the electorate now seems increasingly disinclined to do so. Much of Northern Ireland remains sharply divided among sectarian lines. Both there, and certainly in the Republic of Ireland, there is a resurgent, simplistic and deeply polarising IRA triumphalism, which many among the younger generation — who never lived through the raw misery of the Troubles — are finding quite an intoxicating brew. It must feel a bit exciting to them, I suppose. It doesn’t bode well.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, is exultant. Gerry Adams — now billed on his Twitter feed as an ‘Optimistic Activist’, and cultivating an increasingly bardic, elder statesman appearance — posted a clip of himself and colleagues enthusiastically singing the IRA song Come Out Ye Black and Tans with lines such as “and the dirty English feet they walked all over us”, and “tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away”.  The lyrics of the song, although officially referring to the old IRA of the War of Independence era, take on a darker, sharper flavour when sung by a Belfast-born former leader of the modern Provisional IRA campaign.

The same song was belted out by Sinn Féin’s Dessie Ellis and his supporters, draped in a giant tricolour, at his victorious election count in Dublin North-West (Ellis, who served 10 years in prison, was once better known as an accomplished Provisional IRA bomb-maker and explosives expert). To be fair, Sinn Féin didn’t save all the songs until after the count: during the campaign itself, a party election van toured Kingscourt, Co Cavan on behalf of candidate Pauline Tully with the chorus “ooh, ah, up the ‘RA!” blasting out the windows (Tully later claimed that “perhaps” the audio had been superimposed on the recording).

There was a time when such republican triumphalism would have wholly alienated mainstream opinion in the Republic of Ireland. Yet today, although many Irish people have indeed indicated their strong unease with such scenes — a discomfort that will no doubt find its voice in coming weeks — a growing number of Irish voters now interpret it as forgivable nationalist exuberance.

That is not how it will sound, I fear, either to the families of more than 1,700 people killed by the Provisional IRA during its long and bloody campaign, or to unionists of any variety in Northern Ireland.

Why does support for Sinn Féin plummet sharply among the over-65s? Perhaps because a 70-year-old, born in the Republic of Ireland in 1950, would have been 20 or so when the Troubles began in Northern Ireland. Over nearly three decades, he or she would have witnessed the raw pain and chaos unleashed by republican and loyalist paramilitary violence. For many of this generation, Sinn Féin remains synonymous with the Provisional IRA, and to them the atrocities committed by the IRA were not abstract, but very real.

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Why is Sinn Féin rising?

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For today’s younger Irish voters, however, IRA violence belongs to history. For those with the inclination to romanticise it, the organisation’s long campaign is now distant enough from their actual experience to count as a form of radical chic. For others, that history may simply dwindle in importance when set next to the current appeal of Sinn Féin’s energetic promises on house-building, health service funding and heavily flagged support for causes such as trans activism. Those who wanted to shift politics to the left could always have voted for Brendan Howlin’s Irish Labour party, of course, but its campaign was widely felt to lack Sinn Féin’s pizzazz.

The scale of Sinn Féin’s success has taken Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael by surprise. It has also taken the party itself by surprise: such were its expectations, it fielded only 42 candidates in the race for the 159 seats. But the fact that there has been a sudden, seismic political change in the Republic of Ireland does not greatly surprise me.

In UnHerd last December I reviewed Fintan O’Toole’s book Heroic Failure, The Politics of Pain, in which he argued, among other things, that Brexit was a uniquely English act of self-harm partly inspired by a misplaced nostalgia for Empire. I disagreed, because I thought that many of the destabilising factors that led to the ‘Leave’ vote in the UK – a housing crisis, income inequality, precarious employment among the ‘working poor’ and a widespread unease about the meaning or dividends of national identity – were held in common with Ireland, and could well erupt there in a different form.

While the UK “somnambulist state” had long ignored voters’ fundamental concerns, I wrote, Ireland would be foolish to do the same, “and to believe that just because Ireland isn’t England, the painful fall-out from such a question is inevitably very far away”.

The fall-out has come even sooner than expected. Irish voters were reacting to long-term Fine Gael policy failures on housing, welfare provision and healthcare, the Irish version of the “somnambulist state”.  The result was a localised brew of the populism that has already intoxicated so many other countries – in this case embodied in Sinn Féin’s combination of energetic Left-wing economic pledges, zeal on ‘social justice issues’ and pugnacious Irish nationalism, all bound up with its chilling legacy from 30 years of armed conflict.

What did surprise me a little, however, was the muted response from a commentator such as O’Toole, who has previously been so intensely and eloquently exercised by populist surges in the UK and the US. Yet, with Sinn Féin electoral successes already looming last week, he quickly concluded in a column that “there can be no progressive government in Ireland without Sinn Féin”. Sinn Féin was a “party of change”, he said, “a radical party” – and although he personally was very uncomfortable at its history, “younger people” have decided that the “political statute of limitations on atrocities” had expired.

O’Toole said, however, that on no account must ministers in a Dublin Sinn Féin government seek instruction from very senior IRA figures, as they had done in Stormont: “This is intolerable in a democracy. If Sinn Féin were to take office in Dublin, a precondition would have to be a strengthening of the official code of conduct for ministers to explicitly ban such unaccountable influence.”

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But who, exactly, might police this ‘precondition’? Would Mary Lou McDonald, for example, be prevented from discussing policy matters with her former party leader Gerry Adams, or Adams be stopped from discussing anything he liked thereafter with the broad range of ‘veteran republicans’ in his acquaintance?

The idea that assiduous Irish government officials could somehow effectively prevent or sanction the flow of information between Sinn Féin and the IRA is frankly ludicrous. But such statements nonetheless offer a window on to a worrying illusion, that it is somehow possible to invite Sinn Féin into the running of the Irish state and fully expect the party meekly to abide by new rules.

This electoral outcome is what Gerry Adams has long wanted and worked towards. He is not likely to lose interest in it now. Back in 2017, a former member of the IRA’s West Belfast brigade said this about Adams to Henry McDonald of the Guardian: “He still thinks he can push them on to power in the south [Irish Republic] as his final achievement. So he will be staying around, in the back room, working the controls.”

Many in the Republic of Ireland will point out that Sinn Féin has long participated in government in Northern Ireland (admittedly with a recent three-year break, when Northern Ireland had no power-sharing government at all). But the Stormont administration is devolved, with ultimate power still remaining in London. It was designed as part of a difficult, complicated package to persuade republican and loyalist paramilitaries to exchange a violent 30-year conflict for electoral politics, and is therefore a uniquely odd political structure — consisting of compulsory coalitions in which ministries are doled out like fiefdoms to different parties, the mechanism of government is prone to freezing, and irregular financial practices once thrived (as was exposed during the ‘ash for cash’ RHI scandal).

The democratising of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland delivered a welcome cessation of sectarian violence. But it has also paramilitarised democracy: driven Northern Irish voters to the political extremes, entrenched sectarianism, permitted loyalist and dissident republican illegal activity to flourish in working-class areas, and failed to resolve the ongoing horror of paramilitary beatings and shootings, which hardly ever result in a conviction. None of this is an enviable template, I would think, for the Republic of Ireland.

The Republic, in contrast, is an independent sovereign country, which ultimately resolved its own painful arguments over independence and partition to forge a largely successful and confident modern state. It did not need to beckon Sinn Féin and its Provisional IRA legacy into government; its voters have done so not by compulsion, but by choice, because of dissatisfaction with their existing establishment. They have signalled their desire for a very different political party. But I am not sure that all of Sinn Féin’s new voters have realised exactly what forms that difference may take.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

Most modern political parties are haunted by similar things: the long legacies of bad policies, ideological schisms, media gaffes and personality clashes. Sinn Féin is unusual, however, in that it has a particular problem with mothers — mothers who pursue the party leadership asking for justice, even while it is attempting to conduct soft-voiced conversations with a forgetful electorate.

The late Jean McConville is one such mother. A working-class widow, the mother of 10 was seized from her West Belfast home by a group of IRA members in December 1972. She was driven across the Irish border and into County Louth, where she was shot in the back of the head and secretly buried on a sandy beach — or, in the terminology of such killings, ‘disappeared’. McConville’s traumatised young children were split up and sent to care institutions.

As adults, a number of the McConville children courageously began to ask the IRA questions about their mother’s death. They requested answers from the then Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. The more that came to light about the McConville murder, the more troubling it became for the public image of Sinn Féin: two former Belfast IRA members with close involvement in the McConville murder, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, both alleged that the order for the killing was given by Adams himself in his role as their Belfast ‘officer commanding’, something which he denied.

The McConville case — long the subject of newspaper articles — was recently forensically examined in an Orwell prize-winning book Say Nothing, by the US writer Patrick Radden Keefe. It details the IRA’s contemptuous attitude to the human rights of those it regarded as opponents, not least the right to life.

Adams has now retired as Sinn Féin President, ceding the role in 2018 to Mary Lou McDonald, who has spearheaded the party’s electoral drive in the Republic of Ireland. McDonald does not carry the same whiff of cordite: she was born and educated in Dublin and has no direct IRA involvement, although she has in the past been active in IRA commemorations. Yet McDonald, too, was haunted by a mother throughout this election campaign. This time the mother is alive, and her name is Breege Quinn.

Breege Quinn, an elegant, quietly determined Cullyhanna woman, and her husband Stephen, are still seeking justice over the death of their 21-year-old son Paul, who was beaten to death in an October 2007 attack carried out by local members of the IRA.

Paul and a friend were lured to an isolated cattle-shed in County Monaghan on the promise of work. The phone call had come from another friend, who was forced to make the call under threat. Paul arrived to find about a dozen masked IRA men waiting for him.

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It was an intensely brutal and professional operation. His attackers beat Paul with nail-studded clubs and iron bars for over half an hour. At one point, an assailant shouted out to his horrified friends, confined in a nearby shed: “Can you hear your friend squealing?” Paul Quinn died in hospital: every major bone in his body had been broken and his ear was hanging off.

The local Sinn Féin politician Conor Murphy — now a Sinn Féin finance minister in the resurrected Stormont government — said at the time that the IRA was not involved in the murder. He also said: “Paul Quinn was involved in smuggling and criminality, I think everyone accepts that.” A subsequent report from the Independent Monitoring Commission found that current and former members of the Provisional IRA had been involved in the murder, although it concluded that the attack did not happen with the authorisation of the leadership.

When Paul’s death became an issue in this election, Mary Lou McDonald denied that Murphy had made an allegation of criminality about Quinn, until journalists confronted her directly with Murphy’s quotation to the BBC at the time. At that point McDonald admitted that Murphy had indeed said it, whereupon he – at last – apologised for his remarks and “unreservedly withdrew them”.

In the immediate aftermath of the Quinn killing, Murphy had done everything he could to minimise any suggestion of IRA involvement, including making an allegation that caused continuing pain to the Quinn family. The allegation was only retracted 13 years later, under considerable political pressure in the heat of a landmark general election.

Quinn’s family say that Paul was in fact murdered because he got into arguments with the local IRA. The IRA members resented the fact that he seemed unafraid of them. In that, this terrible killing followed a recognisable pattern for the post-ceasefire IRA — its recurrent, disproportionate fury at young, physically strong Catholic men who refused to kowtow to local IRA authority.

Over 20 years ago, I reported on the IRA murder of Andrew Kearney, a 33-year-old West Belfast man who had reportedly been involved in a fist-fight with a north Belfast IRA commander in which the IRA man came off worse. That victory was unlucky for Mr Kearney, because in July 1998 — only a few months after the Belfast Agreement was signed — at least five IRA men battered their way into his flat in the New Lodge, where he was looking after his two-week-old daughter. They disabled the telephone and the lift, overpowered Kearney — allegedly with chloroform — dragged him out to the landing, shot him three times and left him to bleed to death.

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I recall meeting his white-haired mother Maureen Kearney, a life-long Irish republican who was now doggedly demanding answers from Sinn Féin: as a gesture, she took her son’s funeral bill to Sinn Féin headquarters, but never got a reply. Gerry Adams called at the house to commiserate with her loss, and promised to return, but never did. Maureen Kearney died a year later, broken-hearted. No-one was ever convicted of Andrew Kearney’s killing.

Then, in January 2005, Robert McCartney — another 33-year-old Belfast Catholic man — was murdered outside a Belfast city centre bar. An altercation had occurred between McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine and a group which included prominent IRA men and numerous Sinn Féin representatives. It ended in a ferocious attack in which McCartney and Devine both had their throats slit: McCartney died in hospital. More than 70 people were in the bar at the time, yet there were no witnesses. During the dispute, it appeared that they were all in the toilet. After the murder, the IRA sealed off the scene, removed CCTV and forensically cleaned the bar.

Mr McCartney’s sisters and fiancée fought a long-running international campaign to bring his killers to account. Despite a trial involving three men — including one who was charged with McCartney’s murder — no-one was convicted. The case failed due to the lack of witness testimony and undisputed evidence.

One of the two men charged with, and acquitted of, affray in relation to the McCartney attack, Jim McCormick, was the Sinn Féin treasurer in South Belfast at the time. He was later sentenced to 14 and a half years for the attempted murder of another man, Joe Henry, by stabbing.

The McCartney case had notable similarities with a murder that happened a few months later, in Dublin, of a 29-year-old called Joe Rafferty. Rafferty, a hard-working courier and fitness fan, had got into a dispute with another local man after the man allegedly assaulted his sister. The man threatened him, speaking of his connections to the IRA, and the threats escalated, followed by approaches of Rafferty’s worried family to a Sinn Féin councillor to have the threats withdrawn, and his reported assurance that nothing more would come of it. In April 2005, Rafferty was shot twice and killed as he left his Dublin flat to go to work. An Independent Monitoring Commission report found that “a member or former member of PIRA may have been involved” and that members of Sinn Féin and PIRA “were aware in advance of the threat and did not take sufficient action to prevent it”.

In 2016 the jury at an inquest into Rafferty’s murder delivered the verdict that he had been unlawfully killed by a person unknown. Rafferty’s sister, Esther Uzell-Rafferty, said, “that line is hard to listen to because we know who killed Joseph. It makes me so angry” – but, to secure a conviction, they needed more witnesses to come forward with information.

Despite the ongoing torment of the families involved, a popular line of argument during this election has been, “Why does this stuff even matter? It’s all in the past, isn’t it?” Sinn Féin, under McDonald, are keen to represent themselves as progressive and forward-thinking, increasingly distanced from IRA violence while simultaneously profiting from a carefully sentimentalised and historicised vision of “the armed struggle”.

Yet this election has shown that Sinn Féin does not want to disown its IRA past; it wants to control, curate and selectively celebrate it — to turn the agonising human detail of an intensely sad, squalid sectarian conflict into something hazy, generalised and noble.

The real stories stubbornly resist that narrative. Andrew Kearney. Robert McCartney. Joseph Rafferty. Paul Quinn. All these post-Belfast Agreement killings — of fit young Catholic men who could handle themselves in a fight — have certain factors in common. A perceived slight by the victim against a local IRA member or members. An IRA retaliation of extraordinary violence, resulting in murder. A cover-up, a public denial of IRA involvement by Sinn Féin, and the spreading of rumours about the victim’s alleged involvement in criminal activity. The intimidation and silencing of witnesses. The politically soothing judgement that the killing was not “officially sanctioned” by the IRA at the highest levels. A persistent campaign by relatives of the dead man who refuse to be cowed by the IRA, resulting in a measure of media attention — which, when it reaches a critical point, leads prominent Sinn Féin politicians to utter conciliatory words and publicly seek contact with the victim’s family.

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When the spotlight moves away, however, the “concern” for victims quickly evaporates. An insight into how Sinn Féin really views those who have been harmed or bereaved by the IRA was given by a 2017 WhatsApp chat linked to the Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis and used by party members.

When the prospect of a snap general election was raised, one user complained that it would result in the media being “on the phone to Cahill, Stack, Quinn and all and every other waster they can wheel out with a sob story”. The names cited referred to Mairia Cahill, who went public with the testimony that she was abused as a teenager by a senior IRA member and that the IRA covered up the abuse; Austin Stack, the son of a Portlaoise chief prison officer murdered by the IRA in 1983; and the parents of Paul Quinn.

Sinn Féin is clearly resentful of the fact that these individuals speak to the media at all. They’re supposed to know their place, and keep quiet. A common theme among Sinn Féin supporters on social media during the election campaign was that the media had disgracefully ‘exploited’ the Quinn family. It fell to journalists such as Suzanne Breen, an experienced Northern Ireland reporter and commentator, politely to remind Twitter users that she had been covering the Quinn story in detail since Paul’s murder in 2007, when his parents first began their campaign for justice. If the public hadn’t paid attention before, it wasn’t for a lack of available information.

A significant proportion of the Irish electorate, however, has decided that Sinn Féin’s history is no longer an issue – and the principle of democracy is that what voters want, or think they want, voters get.

Yet, looking North, there is one particular paradox of Sinn Féin’s success. Since it is the most hardline nationalist party, its poll-topping performance has already caused some to talk of a border poll and a united Ireland as a genuine possibility. At the same time, the triumphalist nature of its republicanism also makes unionists much less likely to see their future in an agreed united Ireland.

Post-Brexit, some Remain-voting Unionists – particularly among the middle classes – were softening in their attitude to joining an economically successful, socially liberal Republic of Ireland. One component of this softening was the belief that the air in the Republic of Ireland was not as toxic, in sectarian terms, as that of Northern Ireland, where the loyalist UDA and UVF and Sinn Féin regularly commemorate members linked to appalling deeds which in any conventional war would be considered war crimes.

Sinn Féin’s sudden accession in the Republic will have stalled that instinct in some unionists, and replaced it with a deep apprehension. The atmosphere has changed: even the most post-political unionist would now think twice about entering a united Ireland to the theme tune of “ooh, ah, Up the ‘RA!’”.

There’s a line of Milan Kundera’s, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The steep ascent of Sinn Féin towards power in the Republic of Ireland represents the temporary triumph of forgetting. In the past the party, too, has shown itself to be very effective in enforcing silences. One can even sense a silence spreading in Ireland now, as many of those who are normally loquacious on Twitter fall uncharacteristically quiet on their opinion of the election results, as if trying to puzzle out their own place in the altered political order. I predict that ultimately Sinn Féin’s victory will create a new ideological schism in mainstream Irish society.

Once the election excitement dies down, however, Ireland must surely brace itself for a different and searching national conversation. The questions for Sinn Féin, and the grieving relatives, won’t go away, you know: memory has a way of knocking to be let back in.