Growing Up or Selling Out?

“Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl....” The Clash,  Death or Glory

It was another one of those ‘hand of history’ moments for the ‘Wee Pravince’ of Norn Iron. Former Derry Apprentice Butcher Boy Martin McGunless (excuse me, McGuinness) shook hands with an elderly Anglo German lady called Betty Windsor and her husband Phil the Bubble (Translation for my non-cockney bredrin and those who've never seen a London gangster movie: rhyming slang; bubble and squeak: Greek).

Ordinarily, the meeting of a provincial politician (once famously described by Steve Coogan as looking like a clown without his make-up) and the putative and unelected head of state of a small third rate power on the far -flung European periphery would be an unremarkable event.

This brief encounter however had the added frisson of the politician in question being a former commander in a notorious paramilitary organisation when it planned and carried out the assassination of the Head of State’s cousin some 30 odd years ago.

Of course, for the great British public (at least those who even feigned interest), this meeting was fraught with all sorts of difficulties. Prima facie, the Queen has taken a courageous symbolic step that recognises the political realities of life in Ireland in both jurisdictions.

Her own family’s real and tragic connection with the Irish Troubles has ensured this meeting and her visit to the Irish Free State (does it really deserve to call itself a Republic? I’m not so sure) in May 2011 are among the biggest steps forward in Anglo-Irish relations in half a century.

Not that the great British public would be aware of this. For in truth, the British have, over the course of the Troubles, been poorly served by their media which made little effort to explain the conflict in Ireland or its origins. To do so as responsible journalists would have been to admit the huge part played by the British politicians of successive governments in creating a dirty little bigoted secret right here amongst the home nations.

It was much easier to portray Republicans as the current affairs version of a pantomime villain and that was the image of the Irish Republican that the British public had little choice but to accept as orthodoxy. Therefore, many in Britain will understandably view today’s meeting between a former guerrilla commander and their head of state with a mix of emotions running from exasperation to opprobrium.

Opinions are of course similar to ring-pieces in that we’ve all got one.  While I believe that everyone is entitled to their point of view, I am loath to respect the outlooks of people who know nothing of the subject about which they hold such forthright views.

The British opinion-forming elite seems to be full of the kind of people who unthinkingly bleat ‘No surrender to the IRA’ and are also generally the kind of people who could tell you precisely fuck all about the half century of apartheid that preceded three decades of dirty war in their next door neighbour’s back yard.

Then we have southern Ireland where the tyranny of mediocrity in the established bourgeois media means that mock horror and indignation at the prospect of a Sinn Féin leader meeting the Queen is still the order of the day.

This, despite the fact that Mr McGuinness wasn’t just a Presidential candidate in the recent Mexican elections (south of the Border, down Mexico way), he was one of the few credible contenders for the job.

The reason for this hatred of McGuinness and the northern leadership of the Republican movement is fear, plain and simple and probably not without some justification.  Sinn Féin are hugely problematic for the southern establishment. The history of the would-be Republic, since its bloody inception, has been a political and military struggle against the forces of Republicanism who, to this day, remain opposed to the partitionist settlement for Ireland.  

Much to the distaste of the self-appointed Dublin elites, Sinn Féin continues to gather strength and build political nous in the south while it is already in government in the north. Watching the former Derry OC of the IRA shaking hands with the Queen of England in Belfast is a none too edifying proposition for the majority of the plain people of Ireland.

It seems that  Sinn Féin  can’t do right for doing wrong. On one hand, they are being castigated by the Irish media for refusing to meet the Queen in May 2011, on the other they are being decried as hypocrites for shaking her hand in June 2012. So which is it folks?  But then, hypocrisy, inaccuracy and double-think are hallmarks of the media on both sides of the Irish Sea so they should probably be expert in recognising it.

But the truth is that Martin McGuinness, in the final analysis, probably cares very little what the ignorant British or the self-serving Southern Irish publics think of ‘that handshake’. Sinn Féin  is much more interested in how this plays in the Six Counties.

Their own rank and file will by and large swallow their misgivings and polish this turd as a positive move (which it unquestionably is). The dissident republicans will predictably spin this as further evidence of the great Sinn Féin sell-out. Moderate middle-class nationalists who would have voted SDLP if it had remained viable and credible will sourly acknowledge the move’s symbolism while bitterly wondering what the hell happened to their party.

Loyalism will view the move with a mixture of intense suspicion and grudging realpolitik admiration while middle-class unionism will continue to voice mistrust and like the SDLP, wonder when exactly it was that they ceased being even remotely relevant to the future of any part of Ireland.

Perhaps what today’s handshake really shows is that the only political players on either side of the Irish Sea who are genuinely prepared to take risks for the future harmony of these two islands are a nice old German lady and a Derry apprentice boy....