Anne Harris: Pesky Dinobabies present Sinn Féin with a dilemma

Dinobabies? Never heard of them? You will. Because sooner or later you will be one – if you haven’t long surpassed the stage already.

The word was coined by IBM executives – revealed in documents unsealed in an age discrimination lawsuit – to describe its ageing workforce.

It has a kind of cutesiness; it could be the name of a girl band. But there’s nothing cutesy about it. Sinister might better describe the unforgiving attitude of the giant tech company towards ageing: between 2013 and 2018, it laid off 100,000 workers over the age of 40.

Clearly IBM does not rate wisdom or experience. A dinobaby is anyone who is not a millennial. A dinobaby is anyone whose head is not in cloud services, big data analytics and social media. A dinobaby can be as young as 40.

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That it ended up being a defining moment was due to Claire Byrne's crystal clear mind and her ability to follow a thought no matter what the distractions

The spectre of the dinobaby hung over Claire Byrne Live last week. Because in the Jurassic Park of Irish politics, the question of survival or extinction boils down, apparently, to age.

Lined up against one another were the Sinn Féin aficionados and the dinobabies. And when the smoke cleared two distinct tracks were burned into the earth. Housing and the Past – less twin tracks, more a dangerous level crossing.

Did the programme prefigure this outcome? With loyalists and defectors from all parties, it could have been a carnival of chaos. Or an accurate reflection of the confused state of Irish politics.

That it ended up being a defining moment was due to Claire Byrne’s crystal clear mind and her ability to follow a thought no matter what the distractions.

The programme had its critics which ranged from damp squib (an outdated adversarial formula with cartoon characters) to why bother (must we now have programmes on Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael?)

And, most mystifyingly, Sinn Féin cried foul, insisting that its purpose was to illustrate why not to vote Sinn Féin.

Support

The rise of Sinn Féin is indisputably a phenomenon which warrants a programme from the national broadcaster. The party’s support has increased by 50 per cent over the past two years. And since it is on the “rise”, the number who were there to talk about their voting intentions were weighted in favour of Sinn Féin. The most cursory check of the programme bears this out.

The studio was aglow with Sinn Féin juvenescence. And they were good. Polished, passionate, socialist, they all spoke about the housing crisis and Sinn Féin’s engagement with them.

The programme was rich in irony and paradox. Martin Beanz Ward, the comedian from the Traveller community, evidently on the programme to say why he had left Sinn Féin delivered an apologia for Sinn Féin so powerful Byrne had to ask why he had left at all.

He wanted “to focus on the individual”, was the cryptic reply.

Sinn Féin's aversion to dealing with the recent past seems inexplicable

Michael O’Flynn, the doughty developer, presumably there to dodge some post-crash coconuts, instead gave a shocking reality check on the problems – planning, funding, exorbitant VAT – of building houses. His prognosis that no current housing policy and no single-term government can fix Ireland’s massive housing problem is chilling; for none more than Sinn Féin, which has staked all on that promise.

As we approach the half-way stage of this Government, Sinn Féin finds itself on the horns of a dilemma: does it campaign on fixing the housing crisis – something that is difficult if not impossible in one term? Or does it confront the past with genuine remorse for the IRA’s indefensible violence?

The past

Maireád, personification of dinobaby, said it. Forty years old, she could see, but couldn’t share, young Sinn Féin voters’ points of view. Her problem was she remembered the Troubles. She couldn’t forget the past.

Sinn Féin’s aversion to dealing with the recent past seems inexplicable, given that it is the insurmountable obstacle to Sinn Féin for many. If Claire Byrne Live clarified one thing it is Sinn Féin’s opaqueness about the past.

And it is undoubtedly that opaqueness which compelled Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy’s defensiveness on another fundamental question.

Asked whether, in government in the Republic, Sinn Féin would refuse to give those with criminal (IRA) convictions jobs as special advisers, his answer was a defiant “No”.

Sinn Féin insists that all of this is irrelevant; that much of its support base was not born at the time of the Belfast Agreement.

But they were certainly born in 2007 when 19-year-old Paul Quinn was brutally murdered in the Republic of Ireland by the IRA and, in death, despicably traduced by Sinn Féin Stormont minister for finance Conor Murphy.

Reconciliation comes from remorse and is rarely compatible with embracing perpetrators among your ranks

They were certainly born in 2014 when, as revealed by Máiría Cahill and corroborated by gardaí, the IRA sent child sex abusers south to safe houses in the Republic, having first “investigated” them in some Sinn Féin offices in the North.

And one has to wonder if last year’s Twitter “commemoration” by Sinn Féin of 23-year-old Thomas McElwee, who died on hunger strike, convicted of manslaughter by immolation of mother-of-three Yvonne Dunlop, was not a crude attempt to romanticise an atrocity because the perpetrator was young.

Matt Carthy said he preferred to talk about reconciliation rather than the past. But where was the reconciliation in branding Paul Quinn a criminal? Reconciliation comes only from recognising the immense suffering of victims. Reconciliation comes from remorse and is rarely compatible with embracing perpetrators among your ranks.

Dinobabies remember the past. It matters because it’s the only safeguard against repeating it.