Drip feed of toxic IRA waste will not go away

Sinn Féin leadership needs to look at what denials and cover-up have done to the Catholic Church

Sinn Féin leadership needs to look at what denials and cover-up have done to the Catholic Church

HARD TO think when last one politician on the island, never mind three, could have hoped at more or less the same time for discretion and even mercy from the media, and understanding from the public. Brian Lenihan’s illness, Iris Robinson’s departure from politics and Gerry Adams’s handling of his dysfunctional family coincided with the supposedly festive season. But then many families faced into this new year in no mood for merry-making.

Whatever colleagues of the Minister for Finance think privately about the wisdom of him staying in his job while starting chemotherapy, the goodwill towards him is unmistakeable. The North has to construct public responses to more complicated personal situations. Whatever about her homophobic hysteria and crass expenses, Iris Robinson as a longtime sufferer of depressive illness deserves compassion. As for the Adams family, there is horrified sympathy for the small child, now a woman, allegedly abused from her earliest memories, then fobbed off by her alleged abuser and best-known relative.

While the Robinson and Adams families hit front pages in very different ways, relations between the DUP and Sinn Féin remained stalemated.

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Elsewhere, as chief celebrant of the elaborate funeral rites, Cardinal Brady did mention the scandalous cover-up of priestly child abuse, but he still felt able to laud his predecessor as a prophetic, renewing and transforming figure.

Fr Brendan Smyth, the priest paedophile unmasked almost 20 years ago, continued his nightmarish predation in Belfast and elsewhere during Dr Daly’s time as bishop of Down and Connor. He was the first Irish prelate to apologise to those abused by priests. He also answered complaints about Smyth with the assertion that he had no authority over him, because Smyth was an order rather than diocesan priest.

The funeral pews filled up with dignitaries. For Adams, the funeral provided the most public outing since his own family embarrassment. But there was no opportunity to study the body language between himself and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, the man who may have to tell him it is time to step down. Typical republican unpunctuality left Adams and others to find lesser seats. McGuinness squeezed into camera-shot beside the Taoiseach. Both looked relaxed: funerals often do that for the unbereaved. But his nominal leader leaves McGuinness, and Sinn Féin, in a nasty fix – summed up by a recently emerged photo showing the Derryman at another ceremonial occasion with the Adams brother Liam (at a time when he had supposedly been cast out by Gerry and the party leaders).

The Sinn Féin figureheads built their joint image cannily. McGuinness came forward from the shadows of paramilitarism to stand at the right hand of Adams while the Belfastman talked “the movement” towards the primacy of politics.

McGuinness was there initially as the incorruptible militant, to counteract suspicion of Adams as too political to be trustworthy. Not long into the “process”, McGuinness’s personability became a major asset in negotiations. Some time later the family man image in tweed jacket and woolly pullovers began to count as electoral appeal.

Allies throughout their war, the two men are obligated to each other for the peace they jointly manoeuvred into being. The family without a scandal does not exist, and the tragedy behind what Adams revealed over Christmas may give McGuinness pause. But this pair come out of a ruthless school. Sinn Féin already had difficulties enough: today, after the downfall of the Catholic Church, republicans must at last know that closing ranks around social deviants is the biggest threat to their own communal standing.

If McGuinness heard about the Adams family traumas no earlier than the public, it is hard to imagine empathy in those cool eyes. If McGuinness was told what Adams knew when first he knew it, they share a problem.

It is a measure of how unnerving the sequence of revelations has been that speculation this week buzzed from the inner workings of one party to another, across the gulf that separates Sinn Féin from the DUP. Would Adams depart one step ahead of Peter Robinson, some wondered, or the other way around?

The drip feed of toxic waste from the IRA years will not go away. Honesty is the only answer. If Northern political leaders learn nothing else from the past, they might look at what denial and cover-up has done for Ireland’s spiritual mentors.