There was nothing new in the statements of Gregory Campbell and Gerry Adams that caused uproar in the past week. Both men were voicing opinions that have been held for generations and are still regarded as unremarkable in the political circles in which they move but which in recent times have tended to be left unsaid in public or said in softer ways.
Adams had a solid point which he managed to mess up with his reference to “bastards”. He then made matters worse by insisting that he had intended the term to apply only to “bigots, racists or homophobes”.
If that’s what he’d meant, he could and would have said so. But he didn’t. His remarks referred to unionists with whom Sinn Féin has to share government if the Stormont institutions are to be kept from collapse. That is, to all or almost all of the DUP.
Campbell had a substantial point, too, which was obscured by his gleeful joke-with-a-jag against the Irish language and those who speak it. He had been aiming only at Sinn Féin members who used the language as a political weapon, he now maintains. Again, he could have made that specific, but didn’t.
Wish list
On the contrary, repeating the jibe at last weekend’s DUP annual conference, he spelled it out that it was Sinn Féin’s “entire wish list” that he regarded as disposable.
At Monday night’s meeting in Enniskillen, the Sinn Féin president was responding to a feeling that runs more deeply in Republican ranks than might be imagined in more placid reaches of politics: why are we shoring up Stormont, which we had promised for years to “smash”, when change comes only slowly, if at all, and meantime we have to put up with crude jeers at the Irish language and gloating that the union with Britain has never been stronger?
The difficulty the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership had in persuading their rank and file to accept the Belfast Agreement may no longer be apparent. The party – the army is out of commission for the moment – presents itself as the most enthusiastic advocate and doughtiest defender of the agreement and the power- sharing arrangements this entails.
The stance is closely in line with the feelings of the overwhelming majority of those who have given Sinn Féin its expanded mandate.
Equality agenda
But it was not in line with Republicanism as understood by the many who needed convincing. The analysis which was to prove persuasive held that the Northern state couldn’t handle equality, that determined pursuit of the “equality agenda” adumbrated in the agreement would eventually weaken the structures of the machinery of State until it buckled and became unviable.
The state had been built on the exclusion of nationalists from power; include nationalists as of right at all levels and it will have lost its raison d'être.
This is neither a new nor an entirely unreasonable position. It echoes the argument which dominated anti-unionist discourse in the early 1970s, between the tiny but suddenly rapidly growing ranks of armed-struggle republicanism and advocates of a mass-based movement for civil rights and equality within the state.
The fact that Adams and those around him have, in effect, switched sides in this debate doesn’t mean that the contradictions have gone away, just that they are now contained within the movement.
Trojan horse
Thus Adams’s argument to republicans made more sceptical about the point of the party’s perspective by the sectarian sneers they had just endured: “The point is to actually break these bastards – that’s the point. And what’s going to break them is equality . . . That’s what we need to keep the focus on – that’s [why] the Trojan horse of the entire republican strategy is to reach out to people on the basis of equality.”
His use of “bastards” is neither here nor there. This was platform rhetoric at a time of political stress.
Campbell’s cackling performance two days earlier will have aggravated any unease felt by the activists Adams was directly addressing. He had to confront that with as strong as possible restatement of the party’s analysis and strategy.
Campbell was telling much the same story when he instructed DUP delegates that to give in to Sinn Féin’s agenda by even an inch would be to push Northern Ireland closer to the brink. He wasn’t impressed by Sinn Féin having dropped the demand for a united Ireland in favour of reforms. As his old mentor, the late Ian Paisley, had it: “CRA [the civil rights association] equals IRA”.
Hence Campbell’s assurance to the party rank and file that the entire Sinn Féin programme for change could and must be flushed away.
The two men have each been proven right by the other.