Cillian McGrattan: Sinn Féin’s recalibration of the past and the Republic of Ireland’s ‘Vichy Syndrome’

He suggested that the Sinn Féin leadership under Mary-Lou McDonald may be on the verge of condemning “the IRA’s human rights atrocities” (Sinn Fein is now a hair's breadth away from ditching the IRA so it can enter top-tier politics, says former Provo bomber, News Letter, November 20).

There are a number of reasons offered.

For instance, the contradiction between Sinn Féin condemning what it sees as Israeli aggression and the history of republican murder and bombings.

Furthermore, with realistic aspirations to be a party of government, Sinn Féin will be wishing to “participate in European affairs and hold justice posts and so on”.

The distinct possibility of Sinn Féin being in control of the defence and justice in the Republic should be causing sleepless nights for many former gardaí who will soon know what it was like for members of the Resistance in France being asked to hand over their weapons after the war to rehabilitated former fascists and collaborators.

France had its own way of avoiding the crimes of the Nazi occupation – neglect and the focus on the myth that really nearly everyone secretly supported De Gaulle in exile.

These were symptoms of what the historian Henry Rousso diagnosed as the Vichy Syndrome: the difficulty in interrogating a violent, criminal past and a willingness to ignore and suppress.

Sinn Féin does not need to disavow the IRA in the north because nationalism has already succumbed to the Vichy Syndrome.

There are many ways to illustrate this, but see the complaint by the SDLP’s Eddie McGrady in March 2005 to Malachi O’Doherty in Fortnight:

“I know in my heart of hearts from talking to people who voted for Sinn Féin that their mandate was not given for the purpose of enabling Sinn Féin and the IRA to continue with their criminality and all the other things they are doing on our society from day to day, the small stuff that is [m]ore insidious than the big stuff.

"I hope now they have come to realise that the vote they gave is now being interpreted not as a vote to cement the peace process but as a vote to justify the continued criminality.”

Naturally, Sinn Féin did not see things this way and have never disavowed the actions of the IRA.

When he retired at the 2010 general election, Sinn Féin were polling 25 per cent of the votes compared to the SDLP’s 16 per cent.

The latter held McGrady’s South Down seat (won by McGrady from Enoch Powell in 1987) until 2017 when it returned zero Westminster seats.

The republicanisation of areas such as that constituency depended upon the types of avoidance mechanisms found in other contexts and the quotidian violence that voices of decency like McGrady had to deal with on a daily basis simply became time out of mind, just another episode in the long story of unionism versus nationalism.

There are many voices of decency in the Republic – but there are also many useful idiots in the media and bourgeois do-gooders who want to draw a line under the past and move on.

It’s not inconceivable that such a sleight of hand by the Sinn Féin leadership could add hundreds of thousands of votes in the next election, pushing it beyond the 30-odd percentage share that polling indicates it’s stuck on.

As another historian, Tony Judt, pointed out, the Vichy Syndrome was not confined to post-war France, but was found across many European states after 1945.

And while there is no Cold War to sustain that self-serving narrative, the post-Brexit, anti-English discourse in the Republic provides fertile ground for a republicanisation of the past there.

Not only was the Vichy Syndrome widespread, Judt suggested, it was also long-lasting and resilient to alternative, historically informed accounts.

The fundamental problem with all of this, argued Judt, was not just that it was bad history, but that it recalibrated human suffering according to the goals of the perpetrators.

Sinn Féin progress in the south is about more than history: it threatens to recalibrate the Republic’s entire edifice of societal norms, morality and outlook.

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l Cillian McGrattan lectures in politics at Ulster University. He has published over 20 journal articles on themes of conflict, political violence and terrorism, conflict resolution, dealing with the past in post-conflict situations, trauma and peacebuilding, transitional justice, and Northern Irish nationalism