THE McCartney sisters’ pointed attack on the romanticism of the struggle for Irish unity will reverberate long after the four days of their trip to the United States.

It would be difficult to imagine a more frontal assault on the self-image of the republican movement. At the start of this crisis it appeared to think that any fuss over the public butchering of a man in the street was yet another example of British state anti-nationalist discrimination. The movement did not feel it was on the defensive, but the eloquence of the McCartney sisters has changed all that. The challenge to the self-image of the IRA is a profound one. The best that Sinn Fein has been able to do thus far is to cover the ghetto walls of Belfast with posters of Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who died in 1981. It is a vital image, one of martyrdom, designed to offset the more oppressive image of today’s IRA volunteer.

But even here there have been difficulties. Richard O’Rawe’s recent book Blanketmen, written by an important republican activist who was at the heart of the hunger strike, has challenged Sinn Fein mythology of that event.

Since Sean O’Casey’s play Shadow of a Gunman (1923), the best Irish writers have tried to subject the motivation of the IRA to cool and penetrating treatment. But nothing has achieved quite the dramatic effect of the McCartney sisters’ words: “Any romantic vision of the struggle should now be dispelled.” Irish America is firmly told in language which echoes that of the voice of Dublin’s democratic leaders: “We are now dealing with criminal gangs who are still using the cloak of romanticism to murder people in the street and walk away from it.” Even more remarkable is the McCartneys’ talk of the IRA’s “secrecy, collusion and cover-up”. In modern Sinn Fein discourse “secrecy, collusion and cover-up” are the sole prerogative of the British State, not their own fine, noble and patriotic organisation.

Sinn Fein initially attempted to neutralise the sisters but its effort to co-opt them has backfired. Mr Adams invited them to his party conference, an attempt to smother them in the warm embrace of Sinn Fein. But the sisters refused to be fobbed off by this archetypal Adams manoeuvre. They did not care that Mr Adams felt their pain. They continued to demand justice for their murdered brother. Martin McGuinness then stepped in to warn the sisters that they might be subject to political manipulation by opponents of Sinn Fein.Before they left Belfast the sisters asserted that they were autonomous beings and responded to no other impulse than that of the memory of their dead brother. Upon arrival in America the language of the McCartneys become even more striking and dramatic.

The reality remains that Sinn Fein retains large-scale support in Catholic working-class and rural areas in Northern Ireland. It has also made significant inroads into the middle classes. Substantial numbers of people benefit from the IRA’s criminal and business empire. There has been, until this point at least, no sustained effort on the part of the British State to challenge this underworld. But from this moment, Sinn Fein’s constituency has been told from within — the murdered Mr McCartney was a Sinn Fein voter — what the true cost of this state of affairs is likely to be.

• Paul Bew is Professor of Irish politics at Queen’s University, Belfast.

  BY THE GUN
  
  

• The Provisional IRA emerges in 1969 after the Official IRA agrees to recognise parliaments in Dublin, Belfast and London
  
  
• Bloody Sunday, 1972, British soldiers shoot dead 14 civilians in Londonderry
  
  
• The IRA prisoner Bobby Sands dies on May 5, 1981, on hunger strike in support of political status
  
  
• In 1987, SAS soldiers kill eight IRA members in Loughall. Three IRA members shot dead by SAS in Gibraltar in 1988
  
  
• On August 31, 1994, the PIRA Army Council calls “a complete cessation of military operations”
  
  
• The Irish Government and Northern Ireland police blame the Provisionals for the £26.5 million robbery of the Northern Bank in Belfast last December

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