Mick Fealty in a sharp and poignant post on the acquittals in the trial related to the Robert McCartney murder and their macro implications in the North. It should be chilling reading for the sensible wing of Sinn Fein and anybody who thinks they are a vehicle for a united Ireland:
From the beginning, the peace process was a behaviorist project. It was never as interested in genuine changes of hearts and minds, as it was in outward behaviours. Moral conciousness and other forms introspection were of little interest - and possibly of little practical use - to a society conditioned to profoundly self harming behaviour.
The murder of Robert McCartney, along with Sinn Fein’s and the IRA’s subsequent attempts to cover up the truth of what went on that night (although there are still some who believe there was no such ‘cover up’), marked an end to the convenience of that conceit.
Sphere: Related ContentBut it hasn’t brought an end to the suffering of families in Sinn Fein’s own political heartland.
The peace process ultimately took away the IRA’s weapon of choice. Now it is the victim of a feral society its own unchecked and brutalist approach to ‘policing’ helped create. The wider movement, now led by a party determined on peace needs to find a way of acquiring new habits of mind to go with its new political status.
But as Aristotle has noted, it is often difficult for an individual to become virtuous if he or she has not acquired the habit of acting virtuously. The same may be said for political parties. Sinn Fein, reconciled at long last to a peaceful pursuit of its long term goal of a United Ireland, has, it seems, still to learn the power of the virtuous act.
And that may yet prove the movement’s long term undoing.
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