With a Handshake and a Hug

Tonight The Pensive Quill features Dr John Coulter who describes himself as Revolutionary Unionist and former Blanket columnist. He outlines how in his view Sinn Fein scored mega political brownie points by publicly hugging a leading Protestant cleric at its ard fheis and genuinely prepared the way for a united Ireland by 2016.

With a handshake and hug, Sinn Fein deputy First Minister and chief negotiator Martin McGuinness delivered a series of political right hooks which could see it become the most influential party in Ireland, north or south.

That double greeting became a carefully staged double whammy which will probably deliver Sinn Fein’s ultimate Northern goal by 2016 – to commemorate the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising by becoming the largest Stormont party. That Stormont party would be in a provincial nine-county Ulster with one Stormont-style parliament for each of the island’s four provinces in a united Ireland.

The images of McGuinness, the present Mid Ulster MP and former senior Derry IRA commander, and leading Derry mainstream Presbyterian cleric, the Rev David Latimer, publicly embracing at Sinn Fein’s first ard fheis to be held in the North, will be regurgitated time and again among the Catholic middle class.
 
With the once traditional home of that nationalist middle class about to tear itself apart in the civil war to determine both the future leader and direction of the moderate Catholic SDLP, Sinn Fein will rebrand itself as the true champion of middle class Catholicism.
 
While the SDLP tries to mend its concept of party unity, Sinn Fein is already streets ahead in projecting its image of all-island unity. Welcoming and hugging a top Presbyterian minister – for Sinn Fein strategists - is a major stunt that republicans believe will convince a section of Unionist society to ‘warm’ to the notion of a united island. Somehow, republicans have convinced themselves that embracing a radical Presbyterian tradition similar to that of the United Irishmen will achieve all-island unity.

In the South, Sinn Fein president and Louth TD will want to dismiss the notion that Sinn Fein’s almost trebling of its Dail representation to 14 was not a flash in the pan, one trick pony protest against the disastrous economic policies of the former Fianna Fail/Green Party coalition government in Leinster House.

With Sinn Fein’s main opponents in the Republic, Fianna Fail, going into meltdown – possibly even terminal decline – Sinn Fein will want to rebrand itself among traditional middle class, chapel-attending middle class voters that it, not FF, is the true republican party.

Sinn Fein has effectively five years until 2016 to emphatically convince middle class Catholics on both sides of the border that it is no longer the apologist for republican terrorism, but is the new rightful political home for all rational, moderate nationalists.

No doubt, given the frictions within Unionism, with the current DUP even more liberal than former Northern Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s Unionist Party, with the UUP about to embark on yet another leadership civil war, and with the Protestant churches about to lock horns of gay clergy, Sinn Fein is poised to convince a substantial section of liberal Unionism that republicans should be trusted.

Unionist movements, such as the TUV, which are radically opposed to deals with Sinn Fein, have been electorally neutered.

Only one barrier needs to be crossed in the short term by Sinn Fein – ensuring that the youthful loyalist hotheads do not seize control of the Protestant death squads and begin a terror campaign against people, places and groups they deem to be part of dissident republicanism.

Posted in: Sinn Fein