These are strange times.
For one thing, the Deptford Croppy notes with unease that Fine Gael TDs are now calling for the Fianna Fáil government be "treated like subversives". Ah, the sweet sedition of the gombeen class....Not long ago, The Rusty Wire Service suggested the government was acting like an enemy of the state.
We must however be rather out of touch with the Irish mood down here in South London if we’re chiming with the Blueshirts. Perhaps we need to start shifting further to the left...
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| Jean McConville (left), not long before her disappearance |
Even further back, we speculated that Gerry Adams would yet rue the disembodied voice of The Dark, “like a dead emissary of the Disappeared or the disembodied chorus of a Greek Tragedy, accusing Adams of complicity in Jean McConville’s demise from beyond the grave....is this the stain that won’t wash away?”
And then we note The Guardian weighing in with calls for Adams to be brought before the International Court of Justice....
Unquestionably, responsibility for the horror and tragedy that befell Jean McConville and her family rests squarely at the door of the Provisional movement. And my guess is this whole sad saga has dragged on precisely because the Movement always understood that this one was never going to wash white. Mrs McConville’s torture, murder and secret burial was as grubby and shameful as anything that has happened in the name of the Republic.
It is important to remember in all of this that the Jean McConville affair only started with a disappearance. It is a story that spans decades of institutional abuse and neglect and has irrevocably scarred the lives of many people. It also left a deep stain of sectarianism on a movement professing such high, secular, republican ideals.
But it’s the pathological persistence of Adams’ denials that he was even a member of the IRA during the period that worries most people. It’s not after all, like the public would be shocked or even that IRA membership would be unprecedented for a high-ranking politician.
Most of us have become accustomed to seeing Derry’s OC from the early 70s as Deputy First Minister sitting across the table from the DUP leader (himself a man not averse to posing with a Kalashnikov) any day that Stormont could be bothered to assemble.
Adams needs to come up with a form of words that is much more convincing if he is ever to garner any credibility outside the republican heartlands, let alone escape any hypothetical summons before an International court for war-crimes.
At the risk however of appearing callous and utterly cynical; as the media on both sides of the water wake up to the all too real prospect of Sinn Féin being in power on both sides of the border, Mrs McConville’s story takes on perhaps a greater significance.
The Rusty Wire Service agrees that the McConville family should have closure but is frankly and sadly at a loss as to where this might be coming from right now. If there is an afterlife, we would like at least to think that Jean McConville is there, enjoying her posthumous notoriety as the perennial spectre at the Sinn Féin feast.
Because right now, there seems to be as much realistic prospect of Gerry Adams either coming clean or being tried by the International Court of Justice as there is of British Military Intelligence giving a definitive record of their operatives’ movements in Dublin and Monaghan on or around May 17, 1974. And probably for reasons that are not strategically dissimilar...
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