We, Ourselves & I

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Saturday April 02, 2005 19:44 by P MacR - Mise Fein

I wrote this article when I joined Sinn Fein. I'd just come back to the country from a spell abroad and reckoned they were all right. I'm not convinced now, but I've decided to send in the article anyway as I think it makes some good points.

We, Ourselves & I
By
P. Mac R


I have just joined Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party whose name means ‘We, Ourselves’; a political movement damned as terrorists and criminals by the governments of Britain and Ireland and consequentially turned into hate-figures by their respective domesticated media.

Why on earth did I join them? What possessed me?

Listen. There are many metaphors for the defining event: The snowflake that causes the avalanche, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the grain of sand that tips the balance. They all suggest that there is some sort of switch, some one incident that causes the change. They seem to ignore that part of the metaphor that alludes to all the snow, straw or sand that was already there. So while it is easy for me to tell you about that one snowflake, that one straw, that one grain of sand that caused the change, I cannot explain its significance without paying attention to all that went before.

I could give simple reasons but even the simplest reasons have many causes and they turn have many causes. This is no place for a biography. It is certainly no place in which to delve into history’s tangled roots. But I cannot explain my reason to join Sinn Féin in simple terms.

So, it’s as good a starting point as any to begin with that one snowflake, that straw, that grain. For me it came on St. Valentine’s night. As others elsewhere spent the night snogging and shagging I was spending it slumped on the settee watching the end of a televised debate. It was on RTÉ, which we get in Tyrone with poor reception. I had just switched over from Jeremy Paxman bellowing on Newsnight and had little interest in what I was watching.

Through the blizzard there were six people seated at a table: a professor with a lightbulb head, a bourgeois hippy, a stuffy looking bloke in a sports blazer and a couple of women who reeked of new money; the Irish intelligentsia á la RTÉ.

Invariably they were slandering Sinn Féin. This had been going on since December when the Northern Bank in Belfast had been relieved of around £26 million and the chief of the northern police force (the PSNI) had, without any evidence to prove it, blamed Sinn Féin for masterminding the plot . It was an obvious smear campaign and the usual suspects took the bait even though they knew it was wrong to do so. The usual suspects were the unionists; people like the Ulster Unionist party (UUP) and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) but also New Labour and parties in the Irish Republic such as Fine Gael (‘the Irish race’) and the Progressive Democrats (PDs). It was the latter of these groups who first described Sinn Féin as ‘Nazis’.

It was a risible insult; facile and puny. But that didn’t stop them and the majority of Ireland’s domesticated media from repeating it ad nauseum. Then something odd happened: groups which one would not normally think of as unionist (i.e. pro-British) joined in the chorus. They included Fianna Fáil (‘soldiers of fortune’, although they prefer to have it translated as ‘soldiers of destiny’) and the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). Something was awry. After all, something had to be to encourage traditionally anti-unionist groups to band with their old enemies against Sinn Féin in a smear campaign founded on the unsubstantiated beliefs of the PSNI chief.

And something was seriously out of joint if the government of one sovereign European state (the Republic of Ireland) was prepared to accept as fact the political fantasy of foreign, and frequently hostile, government (the UK) during a peace process designed to bring peace to a troubled part of the world. It was as though the government in Ireland was acting as a sort of unionist fifth column.

What was going on?

The anti-Sinn Féin hegemony was represented by the panel on the dull program I had just switched over to. They were giving their final two cents and each non-entity was declaring that Sinn Féin should be exiled from the political arena. Despite the fact that no-one was going to pay attention to what these people were saying, it was clearly the latest in a series of undemocratic pronouncements. Sinn Féin, don’t forget, are a political party who exist because people vote for them and those voters ought to be represented. Yet it was not this that got to me, it was what the final woman speaker said.

She was referring to the sordid killing of a man in a pub brawl in Belfast. It was mooted that his killer had “republican connections” and Sinn Féin were accused of a cover-up, protecting the killer’s identity. None of it was true. Sinn Féin had actually called upon the local community to help the family find the killer. And, besides, the political affiliation of the killer is irrelevant. The murder was not political; it occurred because booze and poverty had formed their volatile compound. Is any other such killing weighed on the surmised political leanings of the killer?

This final speaker, the kind of self-aggrandising Eurotrash that has grown fat from suckling on the cream of the Celtic Tiger, was filled with righteous indignation. “It’s like something from Nazi Germany” she said. And that was it. After twenty-nine years of living with Ireland and its troubles, that was the final straw, the ultimate snowflake, the terminal grain of sand.

Do these people know what Nazi Germany was like? Do they not understand how crass, hysterical and foolish they seem when they liken the Peace Process to the growth of National Socialism? Do they not understand how offensive they are, how intellectually lazy and ignorant they seem? In previous weeks it had been easy to laugh at them; these oleaginous two-bit politicos considering anything and everything Sinn Féin did to be ‘like Nazi Germany’. Perhaps they really didn’t know how awful a place Nazi Germany was? Perhaps they considered everything they didn’t agree with to be ‘like Nazi Germany’? “It’s terrible weather, isn’t it?” they might say. “Like something out of Nazi Germany”. Or: “the traffic is terrible today, like something from Nazi Germany”. However, this time it was once too often.

But as I say, this may have been the final straw, but there were many more before it.

I grew up in Northern Ireland, a political infarctus and diplomatic abortion that had been designed to be a ‘Protestant country for Protestant people’ in the words of Edward Carson, its founder (although he’s more famous for prosecuting Oscar Wilde). It is Carson’s statue that stands railing at the world from the doors of Stormont Castle, that government building which looks like the White House and lies dormant; a black hole into which millions of pounds vanish each year. Owing to the singular nature of its founding principle those who were not ‘Protestant people’ were not in for an easy time there. And they didn’t get one. The actual oppressive reality of this odd pseudo-country can be found in any good history book. This is not the place to relate horror stories. But suffice to say that people of my background - nominally Catholic, working-class (i.e. poor) and living in the most economically depressed area of Western Europe (West Tyrone) – were not going to have it easy. Our denial of political representation, a means to keep us in our second-class status, was one way of ensuring that we would never attempt to try and make it easy either.

It was this disenfranchisement, and a call for full British (not Irish) rights that lead to the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. The brutal suppression of this movement reinvigorated a moribund Irish Republican Army (IRA).

But you probably already know this, having seen the films, or read the books, or heard the songs, or bought the t-shirt.

The brutal suppression of the civil rights movement was instigated by gangs whose religious zealotry was capitalised upon by those who understand the Orwellian term ‘war is peace’. So long as an internecine war smouldered in Northern Ireland, the less of a problem the people there posed in terms of forming any kind of socialist movement. Because that is what really disturbs the powers that be: socialism; republicanism; anarchism; people power. It is better for long-established powers to set their colonies at war with themselves as this way they can aid one side and thereby maintain control. Such was the case in Northern Ireland as I grew up.

The IRA, for all its Marxist rhetoric, never seemed to be anything other than the counterpoint to the religious zealots of the Loyalist gangs. The contention that Crown forces aided and abetted these gangs only fuels suspicion that a divide and rule policy was the true nature of what newscasters would prissily term ‘the troubles’. It’s difficult to describe what it was like growing up there. Not because I can’t remember; it’s that it’s difficult to describe the interminable childhood days spent wondering if your father was coming home from work at six o’clock, or in six days time after the coroner was finished with him.

And this is why I grew up despising the society I was in. It is typical for teenagers to dislike society. It seems boring to them, stagnant and rife with hypocrisy. But I had a good reason to hate it: it could have killed me. Growing up I became indoctrinated with the colonial perspective. The motherland was not Ireland, it was Britain. Real Britain; not its ill-gotten annexes and puny, anachronistic holdings around the world. Real Britain – England, not places like Northern Ireland which, despite some of its inhabitant’s claims to be British, despite Margaret Thatcher’s claim it was as British as Finchley, will forever be alien to the way of life experienced in England.

It was easy to grow up an Anglophile. England seemed to be more assured and controlled than Ireland. Its society was pluralistic, there was greater freedom, there were opportunities there, and there was a kind of light atmosphere there that was not possible in the Northern Irish benthos where strange pressures twisted all life into lures and traps. I loved England’s sense of humour. I loved its freedom to express opinions without inviting catastrophe. I loved the way people there felt at ease in their skin, unafraid to tell strangers their name in case it became a fatal give-away. Most of all I loved its self-respect, its working class culture that did not feel ashamed of itself; perhaps because it was never colonised, but I never thought about that then.

I was and still am an Anglophile, despite having seen Bargain Hunt. I left school and went to university in England. I stayed there after graduating because I liked it so much. It is not a blind love. I have seen England’s rotten, barren aspect as much as I have seen its grandeur. I found its people’s ignorance of Northern Ireland as infuriating as I found their distaste for nationalism refreshing. But, like a lot of young men, I began to experience itchy feet and felt the world was going by without me. So I left my job and travelled through Europe, fetching up in the Mediterranean. There, away from the world that spawned me, I began to take an interest in it. I began to take an interest in Ireland. And then I decided to come home; Home: not to Britain, but to Ireland.

It is a strange thing to see your home as though for the first time. You become aware of the beauty of a landscape you had taken for granted. You begin to hear accents for the first time and like them. But most of all you begin to see things as though you are looking down on a map rather than up from the street. Ireland’s history, its present and its future began to interest me where once I had felt them to be beneath contempt.

Irish history is always presented as being driven by the Irish. This isn’t quite true. The famed 1916 Easter uprising that is credited with being the start point for Irish independence would not have occurred without the First World War, and that is blamed on Gavrilo Princip, the Serb who shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The civil rights movement in the north was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., a black American. Sinn Féin was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, who modelled it on Hungarian separatists who refused to return elected representatives to the Austrian Imperial parliament. Serbs, black Americans, Hungarians… you get the impression that Irish history is far from being the self-contained story it is often presented as, don’t you?

To that list, and in a purely personal capacity, can be added Afghans and Iraqis. In Northern Ireland Sinn Féin were the only elected party to oppose the attacks on both these countries.

In February 2003, millions of people took to the streets of cities the world over in protest at the invasion of Iraq. I threw my hat into the ring in Rome. It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. As these protestors were only those who could be physically present at a demonstration they represented a fraction of those sympathetic to their concerns. They were the tip of an iceberg. And one would have imagined that, like icebergs, this mass movement would exert such a force on those willing to invade Iraq that it would sink their ambitions. But it was not to be.

For those of us living in ostensibly democratic countries these are strange times. We have leaders whom none of us follow. We have freedom of speech but no-one will listen. We may live where we like, if we could but afford it. We have the freedom to buy things that are too expensive to purchase. We even have the freedom to think, so long as it is within prescribed parameters laid down for us.

What does this tell us about our free world? If we can do as we please, but nothing we do has any effect, what kind of life are we living? Since 2001, a war in Afghanistan and Iraq has been executed against the express wishes of the world’s population. Polls taken by Gallup International prior to the invasion of Afghanistan showed that Europeans were overwhelmingly opposed to it, with support for the war ranging from 8% in Greece to 29% in France. In South America, support for the war was even lower with a mere 11% in favour in Columbia and Venezuela, with Mexico least inclined with only 2% of Mexicans in support.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Gallup poll showed that not one European country favoured war, with the EU average being 11% in favour. Even amongst the ‘New Europe’ states in the ‘coalition of the willing’ support was low: from 4% in Macedonia to 11% in Romania. In Turkey, an applicant for EU membership, 90% of the population opposed the war.

Yet it went ahead. The Gallup statistics reveal a massive body of opinion in opposition to a war that, at the last scientific count, was estimated to have slain 100,000 civilians in Iraq alone and left many more crippled – both mentally and/or physically.

In Ireland too, people protested against the war. Here, specific ire was directed against the government’s requisitioning of Shannon airport as an American airbase; a stop-off point for troops being flown from the USA to Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time the protest was concerned with a supposedly neutral country, as Ireland purported to be, assisting a foreign war machine in a war that the UN would ultimately – one year after the fact – term ‘illegal’. The ‘immorality’ of the killings remains an unspoken.

Since February 2003, it has come to light that the war is underpinned with a barbarity few attempt to justify. In Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, Abu Ghraib and Camp Breadbasket prisoners are subjected to base and humiliating acts of torture. The nature of these tortures was exemplified by Stephen Hopper, lawyer to a Camp X-Ray inmate, Mamdouh Habib.

Mr. Habib was arrested in Pakistan from whence he was moved to Egypt. There he was suspended from the ceiling with only an electrified barrel to support his weight. Hopper described how Mr. Habib would either “stand and get a shock or hang painfully by his arms until he’d collapse”. Worse was to follow. When he was moved to Camp X-Ray he was tethered to the floor as a prostitute “stood over him naked and menstruated on him”. The torture was not only physical. Pictures of Mr. Habib’s family, his wife and children, were enlarged and their heads replaced with those of animals. His jailers told him “it’s a shame we had to kill your family”.

By cooperating with the agents of this brutality, the Irish government has become forever tarnished; irredeemably tainted with such obscenities. When Margaret Hassan and Kenneth Bigley were kidnapped, would attempting to establish them as Irish citizens rather than as British subjects really have altered their captor’s attitude towards them in light of Ireland’s de facto membership of the ‘coalition of the willing’?

The global protest movement against the war and the war’s attendant ills, such as the atrocities described above, is a popular voice that is being ignored by ostensibly democratic governments. What can this tell us other than such governments have not only no respect for those who will perish as a result of their actions, but that they have no respect for their own electorate either? Allow me to reiterate: In Northern Ireland Sinn Féin were the only political party to oppose the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.

After the February protest, I was be able to see that the true schism in the world today is not the one prescribed for us between Islam and the West, but that between those in power and those millions whom they attempt to manipulate and control, or failing which – ignore.

As one of the ignored majority who values freedom and democracy, I found myself questioning those who proclaim to be freedom’s defenders but who behave as though the wishes of their electorate are not worth listening to. Was it not time, I thought, to stop fooling myself and admit that I am just as unimportant to the world’s powerful few as those who have perished in Iraq and Afghanistan since February 2003?

This was the question I had begun to ask myself when I returned home. The war had acted as a sort of catalyst, increasing the speed at which I formed opinions concerning the relationship between me and those who rule me. The war demonstrated the power wielded by an undemocratic aristocracy. You could call this experience an eye-opener or an awaking. It was not that decisive final straw, but it formed the bulk of what that straw would be added to.

By the time I returned to Ireland I was veering towards what Alexander Berkman called ‘communist anarchist’ but what Oscar Wilde refused to put a name to. Perhaps in this age of corporate hegemony, self-determination has become the other love that dare not speak its name. I had come to see Northern Ireland not as a place where Catholic fought Protestant, but where the poor fought itself. Rich people have religion and politics too, but I’ve never seen them in a riot.

I saw Ireland’s problem, north and south, to be one of ignorance about its own condition, like an alcoholic who doesn’t know – or won’t admit – that there is a problem. Its condition – its problem – is political. In ‘Homage to Catalonia’ George Orwell describes the “tiresome” acronyms of various factions fighting in the Spanish Civil war as the “confusing names of the generals in a Chinese war”. So it is with Irish politics, but there are three broad camps.

The first camp is the unionist camp. This contains the UUP, who are Tories; the DUP, who are American-style Christian fundamentalists; the Progressive Unionist Party, who are affiliated with Loyalism; Fine Gael, who are like the Countryside Alliance in the south; and the PDs, who are the businessman’s party, also in the south. None of these groups are on good terms with one another, but all are right-wing and all defer to Britain in one way or another.

If the unionists are British nationalists, then the second camp can be termed Irish nationalist. This Irish nationalist camp comprises of Fianna Fáil and the SDLP. These two groups are on close terms and some sort of marriage between them is always being mooted. They claim to oppose the union (i.e. the continued occupation of the north of Ireland by Britain) but never really seem to want to put their words into practice.

The third camp is the republican socialist camp. This contains Sinn Féin, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Environmental Alliance (SEA). The Socialist Party is small and does well as a protest vote in places where Sinn Féin does not put up a candidate. They have a presence in Dáil Éireann. The SEA is essentially a one man band, the one man being Éamonn McCann, a dedicated Derry socialist who got my vote before that woman on the lousy political show made her ‘Nazi’ remark and sent me into the Sinn Féin camp.

Of course there is also a plethora of small non-parliamentary groups: various communists, small, protean socialist groups that merge and split continually, and the anarchists – to whom I was drawn but then repelled by the archaic CNT flags and black combat gear which smacked of dilettante street-fighters.

Even a cursory glance through anarchist literature reveals the subject to be grounded in the great human desire for freedom. And it is easy to sympathise with anarchists. However, their insistence on achieving anarchy by revolution rather than by increments seems to reveal the methodology of anarchism in a dubious light. The aims are just, but the method seems ill-considered. When I consider anarchism I see it in terms of those who wish to cure and illness by praying for spontaneous remission rather that using medicine.

It is correct to suggest, as anarchists do, that iron rules are unwelcome – not only because they are coercive, but because they are created in the present to serve an unknown future that might be very different and in which the rules will be absurd. But without any structure, even a highly plastic one, it in difficult to see how anarchism can begin to effect liberation.

I came to the conclusion that it is best to involve myself in something that has a defined objective, with the forethought that, were that objective to be achieved, it would serve only as a stepping stone towards further freedom; towards a further objective. And, in Ireland, republican socialism was that defined objective.

Which raises the question of why Sinn Féin in particular? Why not one of the other republican socialist groups? The town I grew up in, Strabane, is in one of the poorest parts of Western Europe. In fact the area is described as an economic black spot. Recently our last factory closed down . In Belfast there are houses bricked up and abandoned owing to the ravages of violence. In Strabane you can see exactly the same kinds of houses; neglected, bricked up windows and rotting from the inside out. But in Strabane it is not the ravages of violence which are to blame for this, but the ravages of capitalism. In the polls, Sinn Féin do well here, more because Britain maintained an offensive presence in the form of a vast army barracks on the border and regularly patrolled the streets as files of soldiers or in helicopters that roared in the night skies.

Because of this I had always thought of Sinn Féin as being a part of the troubles and nothing more. I associated them with the ills that the troubles brought: the dole queues , the fetid dead-end pubs whose dark doorways would belch at you as you walked by, the Pentecostal jabber of the bookies’, the sheer listlessness of life, the ugly concrete and weathered steel of the towns. Sinn Féin are always described as a ‘republican’ party but this always seemed to suggest that they wanted to side with the Republic of Ireland. The concept of republicanism as described by political thinkers down through the ages as the antithesis of monarchism never registered.

Moreover, Sinn Féin were seen as the political wing of the IRA. And the IRA killed people. Therefore Sinn Féin were seen by many Catholics as having blood on their hands. This is the only reason why the SDLP were ever voted for. They are seen as a ‘clean’ Sinn Féin. But they are not, as their cowardly abstention from voting against the invasion of Iraq in Westminster, and the fall-out from the Northern Bank heist would show. But how could I justify joining Sinn Féin if they had blood on their hands?

This takes us back to the invasion of Iraq. An estimated 100,000 people were killed at the last count. More have been killed since. The IRA killed 2000 people during the course of the troubles. The Irish government allowed Shannon airport to be used in the killing of those 100,000+ Iraqis. Now, who is the odd one out? It’s the IRA, right? And why? Because they are illegal. The killings in Iraq are deemed by those responsible to be legal. So it is not the killing themselves people object to, but their legality. The morality of the killings is not an issue, it would seem.

If we look at the motivations for these killings what do we find? The killings in Iraq were carried out by those who did not have to commit these murders. They took a calculated decision to inflict this horror as part of a plan to increase their power on the world stage. But what of the IRA? Aren’t they calculating killers? Certainly they are. They planned to kill people and did so. There is no excuse. But there is an explanation. People like the IRA, or the suicide bombers of Palestine, are people forced to behave in a despicable way. The Russian geologist and thinker Peter Kropotkin once stated that “people are not born bad; rather they are driven mad by intolerable circumstances”.

It is difficult to disagree with this. No IRA killer was born to be a killer. The intolerable circumstances inflicted on them by the unionist state in the form of Northern Ireland drove them mad. Similarly, in Palestine, we see teenagers who blow themselves up, killing those around them. It is not natural for a teenager to get out of bed and go and do a thing like that. Those Palestinian teenagers who do so have been driven mad by the intolerable circumstances inflicted upon them by Israel.

The writer and translator Emma Goldman described the violent acts borne of the madness to which such people are driven to thus: “Such acts are the violent recoil from violence, whether aggressive or oppressive; they are the last desperate struggle of out-raged and exasperated human nature for breathing space and life. And their cause lies not in any special conviction, but in the depths of human nature itself.”

This does not absolve the IRA. But neither does government sanction absolve the killers of those 100,000 Iraqis. Where is the logic when UUP leader David Trimble condemns the IRA as killers but then votes in favour of the invasion of Iraq, thereby making him partially responsible for those deaths? When the IRA killed someone, it was declared immoral. It was. But when a British soldier kills someone it is declared dutiful, even acceptable. Once again, the morality of government sanctioned killings does not seem to be an issue. But, a government cannot absolve a killer. The law is just the permission that power gives itself to act how it pleases; it is not divine absolution.

Currently the IRA are on a cease-fire. This cease-fire is called the Peace Process and is based around a treaty called the Good Friday Agreement. It displeases those who would wish to see Northern Ireland at war with itself again. Peace allows people to look at groups such as Sinn Féin in terms of their ideology rather than their role in the interminable grind of the troubles. And a lot of people have been doing just this and have found Sinn Féin’s ideology to their liking. This is why Sinn Féin have become the fastest growing political party throughout Ireland, north and south. This displeases the unionists, the British nationalists. It also displeases the Irish nationalists, especially the SDLP who used to reap those votes that would have gone to Sinn Féin but for the IRA. It also displeases the southern governing Fianna Fáil party who now find themselves competing (and losing) with Sinn Féin at the polls. This explains their indulgence of the unionist smear campaign based around the Northern Bank heist. It also explains why their leader and Taoiseach , Bertie Ahern, is prepared to act as Britain’s willing pawn.

And it explains the ‘Nazi’ remarks. They are a desperate attempt to tarnish Sinn Féin. Which begs the question, why would people want to se such extreme terminology to tarnish them?

I once heard Sinn Féin disparagingly referred to as ‘watermelons’. That is to say, they were only green on the outside, but red on the inside. It was a remark designed to suggest that Sinn Féin were the reds under the bed. It’s not a bad metaphor. In fact, it is a good one for describing just why Sinn Féin have become such a threat to the establishment in Ireland.

Ireland, you see, is a very right-wing place. Its politics are a curious mix of bar-room nationalism and servile Anglocentricity. For all Ireland’s flag-waving jingoism, if the island of Britain were to fly off the face of the spinning earth and into outer space, half the population of Ireland would run down to the beach waving their handkerchiefs and wailing “take us with you”. And despite being a republic, the idea of republicanism hasn’t truly taken hold in some parts. Witness the scenes of adulation when Charles Windsor visited Cork, the so-called ‘rebel county’. Jesus didn’t get as much praise when he entered Jerusalem.

It’s not just that, like all colonial societies, Ireland aims to ape its conqueror. It’s that it was founded on a profound right-wing bias. The beginning of the modern political state is deemed to be the Easter rising of 1916. This was led by a clique of blood and soil nationalists, the leader of which, Patrick Pearse, worked as a strike-breaker in the infamous Dublin lockout of 1913. He is revered in Ireland. The leader of the strike during the lockout, Jim Larkin, who was once described as a “gigantic Tarzan of all the slum jungles of the West” – a description few Labour leaders would merit today -, is ignored. The Citizen Army, which fought in the 1916 uprising was actually a socialist militia designed to counteract police brutality on the picket lines. Their involvement in the rising resulted from their leader, the Scotsman James Connolly, having rank pulled on him by the nationalist clique – who’s natural support were away fighting with the British army in the First World War. Connolly and the Citizen Army are remembered not as republican socialists, but as nationalists.

The rising failed but it spawned a guerrilla campaign fought by a nascent IRA. This war ended in a treaty with the British, which in turn created a civil war based, not on the establishment of Carson’s northern fiefdom, but on the oath of allegiance to the king. The treaty, which stipulated this oath, was defended by the pro-treaty forces at the cost of 4000 lives in three years and created more than its fair share of horror stories. So this civil war is better described as a counter-revolution, wherein the right-wing monarchist forces defeated the left-wing republicans. This right-wing bias was still in evidence years later during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s colleague from Belfast was one of 290 Irishmen who fought for the republicans. This contrasts with the 700 Irishmen who fought for Franco. These 700 were from the Irish fascist movement, the National Guard, nick-named the ‘Blueshirts’. Today, the ‘Blueshirts’ are how Fine Gael is described by their detractors. Fine Gael, the political manifestation of the pro-treaty forces began life under the slogan ‘the party of the Commonwealth’.

And this bias still exists today. The danger that Sinn Féin poses to the establishment in Ireland is not that of reunification, an event that in itself would alter nothing of significance in any way in the current 26 country Republic. Rather, they represent a force for socialism that is more than a one man band or a protest vote. When parties on either side of the border team up to denounce Sinn Féin on the unsubstantiated word of a northern police chief, it is not because they believe him; nobody believes him, or the nonsense of the Independent Monitoring Commission report into the heist that produced no evidence either and was so ‘independent’ that it was co-written by an ex-chief of London’s Metropolitan Police and the ex-head of the unionist Alliance Party, now a peer of the realm .

Established power, wherever it is, loathes socialism because socialism seeks equality of opportunity and the end of privilege. Established power hates this because it does not want to loose its privilege. And the maintenance of privilege for the elite few is the sole desire of the establishment. Sinn Féin is a risk to this privilege. And because they are a risk to it, they must be halted.

It is, perhaps, true that Sinn Féin are not as radical as they once were. But by virtue of the fact that they hold dear such modest socialist demands as nationalisation and are generally more left-wing than any of their opponents, they are a threat to established privilege.

And so we see the accusations surrounding the Northern Bank heist in their true form. They are an attempt to spell-bind the population. How can you tell the difference between hypnotism and newspaper headlines? What is it that distinguishes mesmerism from politics? The two can be confused, but with dangerous repercussions. For to go through life believing everything you are told without demanding corroborating evidence is an invitation to disaster.

There is nothing new in credulity. And there is nothing new in believing one myth while mocking another in the same breath. And there is certainly nothing new in adopting unfounded beliefs because they drop from the mouths of authority figures; be they governments, or police chiefs or the members of the Independent Monitoring Commission.

The world has been moulded by such beliefs – typically to humanity’s detriment. In the past we killed one another owing to religious superstitions that were expedient to promote. During the witch trials all costs of investigation, trial and execution, spies, wine for the guards, banquets for the judges, travel expenses for the torturer, kindling, tar and noose were borne by the defendant. There was also a bonus to the tribunal for each witch burned. The property of the convicted was divided between church and state. One witch finder claimed he had sentenced 220 women to death for 20 shilling apiece.

How was this scandal possible? It was possible because it was expedient for those on the make to propagate the myth of witchcraft. There was no such thing then just as there is no such thing now, and yet thousands died because people accepted what they were told.

Today we still believe in unfounded superstitions. Sectarianism, racism and sexism are superstitions. And now we have new political superstitions. And like earlier superstitions, the modern political varieties can only thrive in an atmosphere of ignorance and credulity. And an ignorant and credulous society is easy for those in authority to hypnotise.

In Ireland we are witness to one such example of political hypnotism: The Northern Bank heist. It’s not that it’s difficult to believe that the heist happened, but the ensuing condemnation of Sinn Féin by their political opponents, without good reason, ought to raise sceptical eyebrows rather than a chorus of outrage. I say ‘without good reason’ when I mean ‘without evidence’. That is because those who accuse have what they consider to be good reasons for doing so. To the PSNI, the unionists and New Labour it helps provoke popular outrage against their political opponents. For the nationalist camp it helps attenuate the haemorrhage of support they have been suffering to Sinn Féin’s advantage as the republicans wax in popularity.

But without evidence, what is the basis for accusing Sinn Féin other than purely political expediency? And to believe that Sinn Féin were the culprits behind the heist, with no evidence to support your beliefs, you are giving into a political fantasy concocted by those with purely selfish ambitions – electoral advantage in the south or British rule in the north. Moreover, the real danger is not that Sinn Féin’s electoral returns will suffer, but that the IRA may be discouraged from further diplomatic activity and return to violence: A disaster for us all.

In a way, this is a microcosm of global events. On the world stage too, there are political hypnotists, people who aim to conjure up visions for people to accept without question. On the world stage the public do not get what the public want; the public get what the public are given.

Such hypnotists are in the realms of American neo-conservatism or religious fundamentalism. Respectively we see people manufacturing myths of terror-networks or of Divine retribution. And in each instance, no proof can be produced to validate their claims. Rather, they deal in conjecture, they amplify salient events out of proportion, they ignore evidence that contradicts their manufactured myths, and they repeat their message until, like a commercial jingle, it lodges in our minds forever.

But that does not mean that what they say is true. Their messages are no more valid if one person believes it or if everyone believes it. To date, the fantasists in positions of power have wrought terrible destruction around the globe. And by continuing to believe them, we encourage more destruction and disaster: a doomed Peace Process in Ireland, or further war in the Middle-East.

How can such disaster be avoided?

By being sceptical about what we are told. By demanding proof and demanding that the proof be tested. By basing our actions on reality rather than on politically expedient fictions designed solely to increase the influence that a few people have over our lives and the lives of others around the world.

Blind acceptance and credulity are no excuses. No adult population in a democracy can propose a defence of their representative’s actions based upon wilful ignorance, intellectual sloth and prejudice. We all know that price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But when we stop demanding proof, when we believe all that we’re told – then we cease to pay the price of liberty. And then we cease to be free.

I grew up in the economic black spot of Western Europe. I saw too many of my friends fall prey to the ravages of underprivilege. Inspired by what I saw during the February demonstrations, I became a socialist (or an anarchist, or dedicated to self-determination, or whatever new name it might go by) in order to help create a world in which people would have a chance to live their one, unlikely chance of life in something other than abject misery. That is why I joined Sinn Féin. Almost.

There is one other thing and it lies deeper at the heart of self-determination than the nationalisation of utilities. And that other thing is language. Only Sinn Féin champion the Irish language in any significant way.

Nothing demonstrates Ireland’s colonial status as much as its inability to speak its own language - Irish. Today, Ireland is beginning to change how it views itself from Commonwealth backwater to European country. And it is in this light that Irish is so vital. If you were to visit France and everyone there was speaking English while claiming to be French, who would be fooled? Who would believe them? It is the French language which acts as a common denominator amongst the French. Similarly, it is the ability to speak Spanish as a first language that is the sole defining characteristic of a Spaniard. It seems that all nations but those which are colonised understand that your language is your soul: The Basques and their pride in Euskara are a prime example. The Welsh, those who speak it that is, are more independent from Britain than those Irish who cannot speak Irish. As such, a language cannot be measured in terms of ‘usefulness’.

It is important to note that this is not akin to nationalism. The world would be better off if not only the border between north and south of Ireland were rubbed out – but if all borders were rubbed out. But languages and cultures are like organisms in an ecosystem: the more the merrier. Indeed, the more the healthier. And to rub them out is unconscionable. And to let them wither away out of snobbery and sloth is hateful.

So, in this light, it can be seen how the ability to wave a tricolour does not make one Irish. Nor does the ability to carry an Irish passport or sing Irish songs. I love the English language, but I know that I only speak it because my forebears were forced to. There is shame in that. The Irish did not ‘adopt’ English. It was forced upon them. The poet Seamus Heaney once described Ireland’s ‘adoption’ of English as akin to an ear swallowing a rapist’s tongue.

To the Irish, English is Our Master’s Voice. It is an incessant reminder that we are a defeated colonial people. If we can only speak English, then we are forever immersed in the Anglo-Saxon world, our minds bearing the stamp of its attitudes, ideas and ideals. Owing to this nothing distinguishes Dublin from Liverpool but accent. That is to say, owing to this the Irish are English.

At school I was discouraged from learning Irish. It was erroneously described as a dead language, a Celtic version of public-school Latin to be wheeled out by snobs and pseuds as a nationalistic ornament. Now, years later, I am learning it and the feeling I get is a tonic. This feeling is called Dignity.

As with all colonial societies, so long as Irish people speak in Our Master’s Voice, they will never be truly free. But if we recover our language we will recover our independence. Speaking Irish is not an Anglophobic thing to do. It is an Irish thing to do.

For any colonised people, learning their own language is the only kind of freedom fighting worth engaging in.

The Jews, who have a better idea about what Nazi Germany was like than the Eurotrash on Irish political shows, retained Hebrew despite being dispersed and oppressed for 2000 years. They have a word for people like those who seek to promote the colonial status quo in Ireland: ‘nebbish’. And they also have a proverb for those who wish for an independent society, as opposed to a dependant colony; a society where opportunity is universal and who, like me, see in Sinn Féin a way towards creating such a society. It is the proverb that came to mind as I watched that distorted political debate. It was the sound that final snowflake made as it landed. It is the proverb used by Primo Levi as the title for his novel on the partisans in the Second World War.

The proverb reads: ‘If not now, when?’