For ten years, the joint head of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive was Martin McGuinness. McGuinness, who also served as an education minister, was previously chief of staff of the IRA at a time when it committed some of its worst atrocities. His junior minister, Gerry Kelly, is still a senior Sinn Fein MLA for North Belfast. He was convicted of bombing the Old Bailey (among other offences) and handed down two life sentences. “On the balance of probabilities” — according to the judge in a libel case taken against the journalist, Malachi O’Doherty — he later participated in the shooting of a prison officer while breaking out of the Maze Prison.
On a similar theme, the principal deputy speaker of the Stormont Assembly is currently Caral Ni Chuilin, who attempted to place a booby-trap bomb at a police-station in Crumlin, County Antrim, receiving an eight year sentence for possession of firearms and explosives. Even the first minister, Michelle O’Neill, who was not involved personally in terrorism, has frequently attended events commemorating terrorists, and flagrantly flouted Covid rules at an IRA funeral during the pandemic, with no consequences for her position.
In the twisted world of post peace-process Ulster politics, though, it is the involvement in the executive of the DUP’s education minister, Paul Givan, that could cause power-sharing to collapse. His offence? Visiting Israel on a fact-finding trip, as part of a group of unionist politicians, at the invitation of the Israeli government. At the Stormont Assembly earlier this week, there were nauseating scenes, as Pat Sheehan MLA delivered a moral lecture, accusing the minister of peddling propaganda on behalf of leaders accused of “crimes against humanity”. This particular Sinn Fein politician was once sentenced to fifteen years in prison for bombing a cash and carry. After his release, he attempted to bomb a security checkpoint in Belfast, receiving a 24-year sentence for that crime. More recently, he has met senior members of Hamas.
Against this backdrop, rather than supporting unionists by expressing revulsion at the republicans’ hypocrisy, Northern Ireland’s so-called “progressives” joined ex-Provos in calling for Givan’s resignation. They included the supposedly moderate nationalist party, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, which claims to represent the province’s middle-ground, and an independent “unionist”, Claire Sugden. This preening collection of virtue-signallers is supporting a motion of no-confidence, tabled by the hard-left republican MLA, Gerry Carroll, who responded to Hamas’s attacks on Israel on the 7th of October 2023, by tweeting “Victory to the Palestinian resistance.”
The campaign against Givan is actually taking place because Irish nationalists have been taken over by a kind of anti-Israel hysteria
The allegation is that Mr Givan abused his position as the minister for education, by using his department’s resources to share pictures of a visit to a school in Jerusalem. The minister has argued that civil servants’ support for the trip was minimal, no public money was involved, and his permanent secretary, “Reviewed the press release … pertaining to the school visit, (concluding) that it had no political content (and) was directly related to my portfolio.” Compared with many of the things that Stormont ministers have effectively got away with, even if some wrongdoing were proved in Givan’s case, it would be almost risibly trivial. Previously, the executive collapsed because an IRA spy ring was operating out of Sinn Fein’s offices, while, on another occasion, the IRA had killed one of its former members, as part of a paramilitary feud.
The campaign against Givan is actually taking place because Irish nationalists have been taken over by a kind of anti-Israel hysteria. They simply will not accept any disagreement with their view of the Gaza conflict and many “progressives”, both in Ulster and on the mainland, have become similarly blinkered. Belfast City Council, now dominated by the same coalition of Irish nationalists and Alliance that holds sway at Stormont, has voted to fly the Palestinian flag outside city hall later this month. In a place where arguments over emblems have been so intense and emotional, this is an outrageously provocative decision. The Palestine flag has become firmly associated with hatred for Jews and sympathy for terrorism, particularly during the latest war. Sinn Fein and their like have discovered, though, with help from misguided virtue-signallers, they can justify even the most transparent aggression by squealing about genocide and dead babies.
A similar tactic is deployed by republicans when they cast all their demands as rights. The Critic has extensively covered the campaign, particularly in Belfast, to force Irish language signs on communities that do not want them. These studied incitements were made possible by Alliance, whose younger activists are comfortable with the shibboleths of identity politics. The older, more cynically political Alliance representatives, who should be more responsible, seem guided by their goal of winning over softer nationalist voters, particularly in tactical, marginal battles against unionist candidates.
Some columnists, predictably, have tried to claim that it is actually the unionist parties at Stormont that have taken a tougher line, perhaps in response to strong polling from Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party. In this telling, it is unionist hostility that is aggravating nationalists. This interpretation is almost laughable in the circumstances. At the DUP and UUP conferences, earlier in the Autumn, the party leaders competed to deliver soft messages about maintaining constructive relationships at Stormont and mollifying their opponents. They have both long ago effectively agreed to implement the Irish Sea border, which separates Northern Ireland politically and economically from the rest of the UK. The DUP’s first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, only recently co-appointed a new hardline Irish language commissioner, who will ensure that demands for more Gaelic in public life will never cease and can claim some official authority. The UUP’s leader, Mike Nesbitt, even told his delegates that they must become involved in the “debate” about a border poll on Northern Ireland’s constitutional future. While unionists have a reputation for unyielding toughness, more often in recent years they have made unwise concessions.
If they have hit back at republicans recently, like Givan’s muscular response in the Assembly to Sheehan’s lecture, it was because they have been forced to respond to endless aggression. Increasingly, for Sinn Fein and their “progressive” helpers, the idea that unionists should get to express a different view about anything is viewed as an outrage. The no-confidence vote on Givan will take place on Monday. Some of Sinn Fein’s supporters have suggested that republicans could collapse power-sharing if he does not resign, although it is not clear that the party will push the confrontation that far. The pro-Union parties at Stormont are making it clear at last that they won’t be silenced and talked down to, often by people who have committed heinous crimes. The only question is how long they will maintain this sense of purpose.
