Not merely has Mary Lou McDonald increased in size since her election to the European Parliament, writes Kevin Myers, but she is the only MEP who has publicly honoured a Nazi quisling.
Any other socialist party in Europe would have gone for Big Mac's throat and choked the political life out of her for honouring an arch-traitor and fascist fellow-traveller such as Sean Russell; but Pat Rabbitte's Labour Party, demoralised into a craven heap of jelly by the peace process, stayed silent.
When Big Mac gave the keynote oration for Russell, she was truly speaking the language of Sinn Féin-IRA and its weird, demented ethos. She was uttering that peculiar dialect again last week when she referred to the death of "Jean McCabe", revealing all we need to know about the Shinner mentality. IRA murder victims are conflated into a convenient portmanteau word: a widowed mother of 10 is morphed into a gallant Garda detective who gave his life a quarter-of-a-century later for law, duty and freedom. In death they have neither individuality nor dignity, but stand united as an infuriating reminder for Shinners of that moral real world which their bloody myrmidons want us to forget.
A decade of this wretched peace process has not civilised Sinn Féin/IRA one bit: they stand by their murders and their murderers, unbowed and unrepentant, while we have ceaselessly corrupted our body politic to propitiate them. Worse, they have created an entire fiction about the Troubles which is now widely accepted by young people and the working class. When you vote for the PDs, Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, you merely vote for a political party; when you vote for Sinn Féin, you approve a value-system and historical narrative quite distinct from those which prevail in our society generally. The Shinners are not a political organisation but a cult which in many respects is pre-Christian, not least in its pathological disregard for human life.
Thus they have been allowed to enter the Dáil and preach their gruesome brand of hypocritical sanctimony to Government Ministers, without rebuke, for year upon year upon year. How can they possibly know how the rest of us feel about human life, about the rule of law, about the institutions of the State, when they are never, ever told? Anger has become a Shinner monopoly; self-righteousness theirs alone to command; suffering known only unto them.
It is time to end the dismal farrago of democratic self-deceit and double standards which the peace process has incorporated into our political life. No one should be allowed to take a seat in Dáil Éireann without taking an oath of allegiance to the President, and giving an undertaking that our Defence Forces constitute the only lawful army in this State and that An Garda Síochána is the only lawful police force. Failure to acknowledge this essential trinity should disqualify a member from sitting - and if that fuels Shinner victimhood, so be it.
One vital point in the present "crisis" came when Michael McDowell demanded of Mitchel McLaughlin whether the murder of Jean McConville was a crime. McLaughlin said it wasn't, then asked a classical Shinner non-sequitur about Bobby Sands: was he a criminal? Our good Minister for Justice unhesitatingly said yes. You asked the wrong man, my Shinner friend.
The columnist Eddie Holt attacked Michael McDowell in this newspaper for calling Bobby Sands a criminal. Comparing their respective careers and class origins, he added: "You cannot blame people for their backgrounds but when the economically privileged call those less so 'criminal', it begs profound questions." No it doesn't, it begs nothing at all, because the issue wasn't the men's respective "backgrounds", but that one is a democratically elected Minister, and the other was a twice-convicted member of the IRA. And is Michael McDowell, because of his class alone, similarly not allowed to call working-class loyalist killers "criminals"? Bobby Sands belonged to a criminal organisation which by a large margin was responsible for more deaths than any other in the Troubles.
That its members would not have become involved in crime without the Troubles does not mean they were not criminals. No Third Reich, no Nazi war-crimes, no Nuremberg.
Moreover, so close to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Eddie Holt apparently felt no shame at bringing the Third Reich into his argument about the nature of criminality. "After all, Jews who did not wear a yellow Star of David in Nazi Germany were breaking the law." Did no part of him shrink or cringe from such an indecent analogy at such a time?
Rather than trying to refute the rest of his inchoate attack on the Minister, let us attend to the intellectual substance of the source. The Shinners have repeatedly exploited soft-focus, well-meaning journalists in the media, of which Eddie Holt is unintentionally one. Last week - still on the issue of the Third Reich,- and explaining Germany's lebensraum ambitions in eastern Europe - he declared that unlike other major European powers, Germany "never held many overseas territories".
So much for him as an authority. In fact, German South West Africa covered 824,000 square kilometres, and German East Africa 860,000 square kilometres. German Cameroons covered well over 1,000,000 square kilometres, and German Togoland over 107,000 square kilometres. (Modern France covers 540,000 square kilometres, pre-war Poland - "lebensraum" - 356,000 kilometres). The Kaiser's empire also included New Guinea, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, the Carolines in the Pacific, and Shantung province in China.
Eddie Holt is also a lecturer in journalism in Dublin City University: lucky DCU. Big Mac is just junk.