Tom Griffin (London, OK): A leading member of Sinn Féin dismissed the Conservative Party's latest foray into Northern Ireland politics during a visit to London at the weekend. Seanna Walsh, the head of the Sinn Féin Culture Department, said his party were not worried about the emerging alliance between the Conservatives and the Ulster Unionists.
"We do not believe that David Cameron is any way emotionally or realistically attached to the union between the North of Ireland and Britain," Walsh said. "The UUP vote collapsed in the last election, and they are not the entity which they once were. They used to have 10 or 12 MPs in Britain. They now have one. So it's not a concern that we would have, who David Cameron hitches his wagon to. We would see it as being totally opportunistic."
Walsh, the former leader of IRA prisoners in the H-blocks, was speaking at a special screening of Hunger, the British film which portrays the death of his predecessor Bobby Sands in the 1981 hunger strikes.
Walsh suggested that there were two major gaps in the film's portrayal of the period. "One of them I felt was deliberate. The other possibly less so."
"The first one is that it does not give any real context to the conflict in Ireland. It doesn't give any sense of what had led to the no-wash protest, what had led to the blanket protest. I think that was deliberately done so that what happened on the screen, to a large extent could have been anywhere. It could have been Abu Ghraib in Iraq, it could have been Guantanamo, or any other prisons."
"The second bit that I felt was missing is that there's no sense of comradeship. It's almost as if the prisoners are individuals, they're like islands. There's no sense of the interaction, the very, very close bonds that built up between the prisoners. It was these bonds which helped us get through the worst of it. But, those two criticisms are very minor, When you look at the broad canvas."
Some 200 people attended the screening at the Rio Cinema in Hackney. A discussion following the film featured some pointed questions about the legacy of the hunger strikes and current republican strategy.
In response, Walsh offered an account that was notable for emphasising the roots of the the IRA's campaign in civil rights demands rather than traditional republican goals.
"As republicans we didn't plan to go out and engage the British," he said. "This wasn't something that a large section of the Irish people had been plotting and planning for for years. People went out onto the streets of the north, and asked for equality. They asked for human rights."
"For having the effrontery to confront the northern state, sections of the unionist population attacked the nationalist areas, and the police and the state reacted very, very violently."
"When you ask for your rights and you are attacked, you are not going to go out onto the streets a second time unarmed. That in effect a large part of what happened with the nationalist people. There were elements of the IRA who's always been there, who'd always been in the background, who had known armed struggle from the 20s, the 40s, the 50s. Once a generation find themselves in a situation that they are challenging the British state in Ireland, they will turn to these people for their knowledge and their expertise. It wasn't that we awoke one day and said we're going to challenge the British. "
Walsh nevertheless emphasised Sinn Féin's continued commitment to Irish unity. "We have to convince a section of unionism, that its in their best interests, at some stage in the future, to have a united Ireland. All the problems and all the hang-ups that they have, that's up to us to resolve."
Walsh also praised the Labour Government's role in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement, in the face of what he suggested was significant opposition to the peace process from within the state itself.
"[Tony Blair] didn't do a lot for many other areas of conflict. When you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, its an indictment of his whole leadership. But in regard to Ireland he came in with a different attitude than anything that we had ever seen before."
"The British Government and the British establishment is not monolithic. We came to learn through the negotiations, there were a whole range of different interest groups involved. Some of them obviously took on board what happened in Ireland. Others were just looking for a chance to smash the ceasefire at times and get another dig at the IRA. That would have been the case until possibly 2005."
