Jennifer Horgan: Sinn Féin has only one narrative and can never lead the country

I also feel let down by the current Government. People are suffering without basic supports, adequate services, affordable housing.

And yet, I could never tick Sinn Féin’s box on my ballot card. For me, the party has one huge flaw. It relates to empathy.

Empathy draws attention to lived experience, trauma, and the complex, messy business of being human. It is the champion of fairness. Sinn Féin shows deep empathy for people on its own side. 

And in this, there is the potential for the greatest harm. A political party must have the capacity to show empathy for all sides. They must rise above the fray and maintain an unflinching sense of moral right and wrong, whatever their personal leanings.

Sinn Féin is no such party.

In his conversation on the Mick Clifford Podcast recently, Danny Morrison, former Provisional IRA volunteer, highlights the roots of the violence in the North as a way to excuse the violence of the IRA. 

He details the horrendous injustices committed by British governments and the concurrent neglect of Irish people in the North by successive Irish governments. Like Michelle O’Neill, he frames the violence of the Troubles as inevitable.

His empathy for Northern Catholics is warranted. A dear friend of mine grew up in Belfast in the lead-up to the Troubles. He lived the experiences described by Morrison firsthand. To empathise with the roots of violence is no bad thing. We cannot simply dismiss all who joined the IRA as villainous psychopaths. 

The Catholics in Northern Ireland were horrendously treated up to and after the civil rights movement. The British government was despicably cruel and turned its guns on innocent people.

However, to describe terrorist violence as inevitable or righteous shows a complete absence of empathy for anyone living beyond the world of violent Republicans. 

In the hearts of these commentators, there is a sinister dichotomy. 

Empathy for their own one side, yes, for the people willing to take up arms, a beautiful kind of empathy perhaps, a ‘terrible beauty’ maybe. But their empathy goes no further.

Morrison does little to explain how what began as a legitimate civil rights movement, suddenly and without a mandate, morphed into the fight for a united Ireland, disregarding the demography of the six countries at the time.

Impact of IRA violence

He does little to engage with the impact of IRA violence (killing more than any other group) on the communities they supposedly represented in the North and South. The impact of their violence on British families is absent also. People like Morrison concentrate on the British government, the Irish Government, the British army, and the violent arm of unionism.

The brother of my loved one was shot at the age of 17. An innocent bystander, he never walked again. Their family pain is deep and absolute and lasting. All six children emigrated as quickly as they could, urged to do so by their parents. For them, violence never felt inevitable or warranted or good.

Where is Sinn Féin’s empathy for them? Where is their commemoration, their song?

In Ireland today, every death that happens in traumatic circumstances is recognised. We hear the stories on the news of deaths and funerals. We hear about the life-changing injuries caused to the survivors and hear stories of trauma suffered for years afterwards. Families are supported, and offered counselling.

My loved one’s family got no such support. They were a Catholic family who had suffered discrimination, yes, but for whom violence was never the answer. As far as I’m aware, Sinn Féin does nothing to help the families it destroyed.

Where is Sinn Féin’s outrage and despair, indeed its apology, for the death of Nivruti Mahesh Islania, a six-month-old baby shot in the head alongside her father in then-West Germany in 1989 by the IRA? 

Too often, Southern commentators and supporters of Sinn Féin, demand we feel empathy for their side. They take offence when past victims are mentioned. There is a ‘we weren’t that bad really’ sentiment creeping in. They frame any opposing or balancing point of view as Southern apathy.

I am not apathetic. I empathise with anyone who has suffered violence and discrimination and I want peace for all people, whatever their faith or political view.

Young people voting Sinn Féin

Young people across the country are voting Sinn Féin now, singing the Wolfe Tones, because they are being manipulated by distorting empaths. Singer Derek Warfield defends people’s right to “express their heritage and their story”. But a one-sided story is half a story.

Perhaps before singing their songs, at least at political rallies, Sinn Féin could ask their audience to remember the 3,720 people who were killed as a result of the Troubles. 

Perhaps they could invite everyone present to bow their heads for the approximately 47,541 people who were injured. They could sing, but also show some reverence — they could display bravery and honour enough to sit in that awful human suffering if they are going to shout about it.

And all their rhetoric about a united Ireland pays far too little attention to the majority of people living in the North right now, who are very clear about their desire to stay in the union. This, I would argue, is true Southern apathy.

As Mary MacAleese so eloquently put it on the Late Late: we must “leave it to the terms of the Good Friday Agreement”. By those terms, we can only have a united Ireland when the people of Northern Ireland want it.

I know in my soul that the recent rise in anti-English rhetoric is dangerous. It is not outrage that I feel — it is fear. As a child growing up in the '80s and '90s I heard about the innocent people on both sides, the taxi drivers, the people in bars and supermarkets, ordinary people, being slaughtered on my island and beyond it. I felt the tension when my English cousins came to visit. It was all very ugly and terribly, terribly sad.

IRA sympathisers or apologists demand empathy for one small group and their histories. They proclaim their right to chronicle their past; to scream and sing it loudly. I can offer the singers empathy, yes, but not exclusively.

Perhaps I could vote for Sinn Féin if they were ever to truly denounce their violent past but they never will. Their silence is a chalk line; it marks the limits of their humanity.

Mary Lou MacDonald will only attend the funerals of republicans. She will continue to attend the funerals of people who brought about incredible suffering and pain for thousands of families. For this reason alone, she is not a leader. She is a one-sided politician through and through.

When criticised for attending the commemoration of a republican who died trying to bomb a police station in 1972, she is recorded as having said the following: “I am a republican, that's not a secret," going on to explain: "I did know these young fellas personally and I know their families and friends and I know the community they came from.

“We all have a different narrative, and we'll always have a different narrative, and people have a different perspective on the past.”

It’s a deep concern that this party will only ever feel the pain of one narrative, one perspective. Such a party can never lead a country.

This article was amended on September 23 as it mistakenly referred to someone as being the victim of an IRA bombing. We apologise for the error.