On Coronation Day, How British Tories Ought To View Sinn Fein – From ‘The Spectator’s’ Brendan O’Neill

“The right needs to calm down about Sinn Fein. It needs to chill out about the fact that the party’s vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, will be attending the coronation of King Charles. It needs to relax about that selfie featuring Sinn Fein’s former president, Gerry Adams, gurning next to Joe Biden during his jaunt in Ireland. It needs to stop fretting over the spike in support for Sinn Fein in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in recent years.

“For all of this stuff is not proof that Sinn Fein’s old radical goal of creating a 32-county republic is gaining ground. On the contrary, it points to the neutering of Sinn Fein, to its hollowing out and humiliation; to the transformation of this once guerilla-style party into Ireland’s version of the Lib Dems. Pale, drab and madly keen to cosy up to the powerful, Sinn Fein has well and truly had its balls removed.

“In sidling into Westminster Abbey, Michelle O’Neill is signalling her acceptance of the legitimacy of the British monarchy, It is hard to think of another political party on these isles that is as politically compromised as Sinn Fein. That has so breezily dispensed with every principle it once held dear. And that’s saying something, given we have a Labour party that has turned its back on people who labour, a Conservative party that is not particularly conservative, and a Liberal Democrat party that is neither liberal nor democratic.

“And yet Sinn Fein outdoes them all in the self-betrayal stakes. It has gone from being a party opposed to Empire to a party enamoured of Empire, especially the European one. From rebels to lackeys in the space of a generation – it’s hilarious.Consider Ms. O’Neill’s decision to swing by Westminster Abbey this Saturday and watch agog as Charles III and Camilla are crowned King and Queen of the United Kingdom – which includes Northern Ireland.

“There was a time when the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht cheekily treated royals as normal citizens. It referred to the then Prince of Wales as ‘Charles Windsor’, to puncture the Brits’ daft belief that this man’s blood made him special. And yet now the party’s VP will watch as ‘Charles Windsor’ is enthroned as God’s chosen ruler of the kingdom she lives in.There has been much discussion about O’Neill’s attendance of the coronation. The chattering-class consensus is that she’s playing a blinder, strategically speaking. It is ‘smart politics’, says an analyst at Queen’s University Belfast: O’Neill is demonstrating that Sinn Fein has the ‘necessary political tact and diplomacy to represent Ireland on the world stage’.

“A writer for the New Statesman gushes over her ‘saviness‘’\.Come on. Can’t we acknowledge that O’Neill’s coronation trip represents a trashing of the ideals Sinn Fein was founded on? In sidling into a pew at Westminster Abbey, O’Neill is signalling her acceptance of the legitimacy of the British monarchy, including of its reign in Northern Ireland. She’s taking the knee to ‘Charles Windsor’. She’s bowing down to the master her political forebears swore to defeat.It took the small Irish party People Before Profit\ to cut through all the jabber about O’Neill’s brilliant diplomacy.

“They said it will be a sad day when ‘the Sinn Fein leader toasts the head of the British armed forces’. This might be old-world, nostalgic lingo, a slightly sad rehash of battles of the 20th century, but there’s something bracing in it too. Especially when everyone else is so keen to dress up Sinn Fein’s perfidy as savvy.It isn’t only the old enemy that Sinn Fein is cuddling up to. They love other Empires, too. The conservative handwringing over that Biden and Adams selfie struck me as odd. Because surely the real story there was not that Biden is a hardline Irish republican but that Adams has ditched his old anti-imperialism to such an extraordinary extent that he’s now tragically eager to press the flesh, if only for a few fleeting seconds, with America’s imperial leaders.

“If they had looked more dispassionately at that pic, commentators would have clocked that the real story it told was of Sinn Fein becoming yet another staid, middle-class, technocratic party, happy to be in the orbit of American power, like the rest of them.Then there’s Sinn Fein’s eye-swivelling compromise on the European Union. On the rare occasion that the emasculated New Sinn Fein pays lip service to the idea of a United Ireland, they make it clear that their vision is of an Ireland united under the dominion of Brussels. It is hard to overstate what a profound repudiation of principle this represents. In the 1970s, Sinn Fein was thoroughly Eurosceptic. One of its leaders \said he was ‘perplexed’ by the idea that Ireland should join the EU and ‘surrender its sovereignty to an even bigger entity than Britain’.

“And yet here is modern Sinn Fein cheerleading for Brussels, begging to be governed from afar. ‘Surrender’ really is the operative word. Sinn Fein is happy to surrender sovereignty to Europe, and to surrender its every founding ideal in the name of winning votes, getting some nice write-ups in the Irish Times, having five seconds in the company of Joe Biden, and securing a seat in the abbey as Charles Windsor is crowned their King. People on the right who don’t like Sinn Fein have no need to panic. It is a completely defeated political outfit. The rabble-rousers of old are now Guardianista patsies of new empires and uncritical mouthpieces of woke dogma. They’re about as threatening as Ed Davey.”