Sinn Fein's participation in the current general election will provide a re-enactment of one of the key dynamics of Irish identity since independence: absence. Indeed, through its manipulation of absence Sinn Féin can rightfully claim coherence with the foundation of the Irish State, writes Tom Quinn
Absence is endemic in Ireland. Indeed, so numerous are the ways in which it has contributed to the making of Irish reality that Ireland can only be properly grasped through examination of its many modes.
That absence is inherent in the ethos and operation of the Republic is not surprising. After all, the Republic emerged from absence. The founding absence was that of the tens of thousands of Irishmen who fought and died in the Great War. Their absence left a vacuum at home. This absence would be filled by men who would themselves come to embody absence, the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising. Their "sacrifice" was the ultimate enactment of the power of absence. The legitimacy of the Republic derives from this power and as such it is founded in a politics of absence.
The dead of 1916
The absence of the dead is fascinating. They are absent in many different ways. There are, for example, the dead you see and the dead you do not see. Thus, while the Republic was being constructed, the principal dead of 1916 adorned every school classroom, while the dead of the Great War remained invisible.
Ireland's Great War dead were doubly absent. Absent through death, their bodies exiled in the war's dispersed necropoli, they were part of a true Irish diaspora of absence. Absent also through memory, they were the victims of an almost magical act of disappearance, a sleight of hand responsible for one of 20th-century Europe's most extravagant examples of memory loss.
The Republic defined itself through manipulation of the absence of both the 1916 leaders and the Irish Great War dead. A logic of absence was created, which would shape Ireland and which continues to do so. For example, the logic of absence, call it constriction of identity, produced a massive diminution of the South's Protestant population. And absence became Ireland's face to the world through Irish neutrality.
The engagement of many Irish men and women in the second World War and in other conflicts can be interpreted as a direct refusal of the politics of absence as practised by the Republic.
Other significant modes of absence were provided by censorship and, most obviously, emigration, while one of the most recent manifestations of absence within Irish society surfaced during the abortion debates. The notion that there is "no abortion in Ireland" is a direct outcome of the politics of absence in its most emphatic tones of denial and negation. Both the women who travel to Britain to obtain abortions and the foetuses who remain there constitute yet another dimension of the Irish experience of absence. They have been volatilised, to form a secret, silent substratum within Irish society another layer of the hidden diaspora of the Irish "disappeared" which begin with the Great War and the foundation of the state.
Object lesson
Absence still worms away at the Irish soul. As I suggested at the outset, Sinn Féin's presence in the forthcoming General Election will provide an object lesson in the politics of absence.
It beggars belief that any political grouping implicated in the murder of Northern Irish Catholics could stand for election in the South. Yet a party guilty by association, if not more, of the murder of hundreds of Northern Catholics is about to do so, in the full glare of the media spotlight and backed up with as powerful a public relations machinery as any on this island. It does so with a real hope of holding the balance of power in the next government. It seems incredible that anyone in the South would vote for such a party. But such is the power and the irony of the politics of absence that many voters will.
Not surprisingly, Sinn Féin, has been, of necessity, a most vigorous exponent of absence. Rooted in violence and criminality, its political being has been shaped by denial and negation. Denial of its links to the IRA is one aspect of this. The war waged by its military wing against the population it claimed to defend is another. At the heart of this war against "its own" are the "disappeared" - Catholics murdered by the IRA who, quite simply, removed all trace of them. Sinn Féin is so adept at the politics of absence - or, in this instance, "disappearance" - that it has managed to keep its military wing's murder of Northern Catholics, the dead you do not see, on the dark side of its public relations, while of the dead you do see - those of Bloody Sunday and the Hunger Strikes - are relentlessly exploited.
Monstrous absurdity
It is estimated that 5 per cent or more of the Republic's electorate will vote for a party whose record of violence towards Northern Catholics would do credit to any of the North's loyalist paramilitary groups. This monstrous absurdity, however, is not just the outcome of the logic and politics of absence or disappearance as practised by a Gucci-suited Sinn Féin/IRA; it is the outcome of a politics of absence and disappearance concomitant with the foundation of the Irish Republic itself and which made absence and disappearance core elements in Ireland's political reality.
Sinn Féin/IRA's manipulation of the dead you see and the dead you do not see is the culmination of the politics of absence in 20th-century Ireland. Any power gained by Sinn Féin in the forthcoming election will ensure that this key dynamic of absence and memory loss on which the Republic has thrived continues well into the third millennium.