A Historian For All Seasons – Diarmaid Ferriter interview

At Hot Press’ request, Professor Diarmaid Ferriter is trying to think of a joke about historians. “Hmm... as in how many historians does it take to change a light bulb?” the 41-year-old Dubliner muses. He takes a contemplative sip of beer. “They don’t use light bulbs,” he says. “They use candles!”

He smiles and shrugs apologetically. “I just made that one up myself. Sorry! I’m sure there are much better ones.”
We’re meeting in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel on Friday, November 21st. Tall, lean and with a tightly shaved cranium, the casually dressed academic (he’s wearing beads around his wrist) looks like he’s just stepped off the set of Love/Hate. In actual fact, Ferriter – who’s far friendlier than his vaguely forbidding appearance might indicate – is one of Ireland’s most respected and high-profile historians. Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin, he is also the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, and a regular current affairs commentator on radio, TV and in the print media. He most recently hit the headlines when he questioned the appropriateness of any member of the UK monarchy being invited to Dublin to attend the planned Easter Rising centenary celebrations in 2016.
As he sees it, current and historical affairs are particularly intertwined in Ireland. “Everyone in this country is a historian,” he explains. “There’s a huge interest in history in Ireland, because it’s so caught up in public affairs. I’ve often said that it’s a very good country to be a historian in. But it also means that historians can be taken on. They’re not up there in an ivory tower. Some of them are, obviously. But a lot of the stuff I would do is what I suppose you would call ‘public history’.”
Before we get into the public stuff, first a few questions about Ferriter’s personal history...
OLAF TYARANSEN: What’s your earliest memory?
DIARMAID FERRITER: My earliest memory is of my sister coming home when I was about two... and then there’s no memory for quite a few years after that. I remember starting school. We were talking about this recently because we all started school at [age] four and I didn’t seem to be remotely traumatised by my first day at school, which is ironic because I came to really dislike school. I always thought it was an unnecessary evil, an incarceration I couldn’t wait to get out of. But I was in my own father’s school: both my parents were teachers, so maybe that eased the transition.
How big was your family?
I’m the third of four. I‘ve an older brother and sister, and a younger sister. We grew up in Dundrum, the leafy suburbs. My parents trained in Drumcondra and Limerick, and met each other when they were 19, and got married very young. I was very conscious that they were a lot younger than any of my peers’ parents, but the profession that they were in as teachers meant we had a lot of time with them. My father was a very active trade unionist as well, but in the summers there was a lot of downtime.
Was it a religious household?
Not at all. Most of the people that I knew, there were rules – you went to mass, you did this, you did that. We had a much more relaxed regime. My parents were very strict, disciplining people who were being selfish or discourteous, but they weren’t carrying that faith. They had their own ways of thinking about the bigger questions, but I remember being really conscious at an early stage that there was no pressure on me and my siblings to go to Mass or go to Confession. Ironically I spent a lot of my youth in the Pro-Cathedral because I was a singer, a chorister, in a boy’s choir.
Did that just come from a love of singing?
No, it came from my parents trying to keep me out of trouble because it got to the stage where I was very, very difficult in primary school and they were hugely frustrated with me.
It must have been difficult for your dad...
I moved after a couple of years back to school in Dundrum. It’s fine for Infants, but you don’t want your dad in the next room and he doesn’t want you in the next room, either, especially if you’re a pup. I suppose they realised this guy has a musical ear, because my father had a brilliant music collection. He was a real ‘60s child, huge Bob Dylan fan, and of classical music and traditional Irish music, and I always drawn towards those musical influences, and so how do you find an outlet for that? So went in and did an interview – a singing interview! – and I was there from when I was 10 to 14, until my voice broke. I loved the music side of it, and whatever was going on down at the altar in relation to the faith wasn’t really relevant to us. It was a great way of learning music, and there’s a discipline to it when you have to work with a big group. It did me a lot of good.
What kind of music were you into outside of that?
Oh, I was into all the ‘80s stuff. I was always a big Beatles fan, which was unfashionable amongst my peers, but we were also big Morrissey fans, The Smiths, A-ha, a lot of that mainstream kind of thing. I was a big U2 fan. The Joshua Tree was my big teenage album. I listened to that endlessly because ‘87 would have been when I was doing the Inter Cert and it was the first time I saw U2 in concert in Croke Park. I also liked classical music, even at that stage. I listened to it because it was always there. My father and his brother were always comparing their latest albums. The record player was the most sacred object in the house. The biggest trouble I ever got into was for damaging the needle.
Were you troublesome in secondary school?
More in primary. I had big problems with authority, big problems with being told what to do and when to do it. I still have some of the old school reports from my primary school and they don’t make for nice reading. So there was a couple of years where my parents had to read me the riot act. The fact that they were teachers meant they were well aware of what was involved in trying to control a big class. My dad’s always laughing, these days, when he hears stories about the perils of trying to control a class of 25 or 26. When they started teaching some of those classes had 45 or 50.
Where did you go to secondary school?
I went to a very big secondary school, Oatlands, up in Kilmacud that had the guts of 900 students. It was massive, almost like a factory. It was a good school, but having that many boys under one roof with almost an entirely male teaching staff is not good for them. It’s nice to see our kids now being educated with boys, because I’ve three girls and it wasn’t an option back then.
I presume history was a favourite subject?
History and English. I liked the Irish language, but I found it very difficult. Wasn’t good at the sciencey subjects. Hated maths. My attitude was that if I can add, subtract, multiply and divide, I really don’t need to know anything else so keep those theorems away from me. I couldn’t focus on that kind of stuff at all. I put myself into history, but it wasn’t that I had set myself on this path. I think a lot of it comes from what’s on the bookshelves when you’re at home. In the ‘70s, there was the beginning of a questioning of some of the old truths, and some interesting books coming out, controversial biographies of people like Patrick Pearse, and they were at home and I was always devouring the Encyclopedia so I obviously had that thirst for knowledge.
How were you with girls?
I actually met my wife, Sheila, when we were teenagers. We were all members of this tennis club, which sounds very posh but it wasn’t posh at all: it was a kip. There was this kind of rundown prefab there and a few old, rickety tennis courts. We spent all of our summers down there and we had a ball. We picked up lots of our bad habits down there.
What age were you when you met?
I met her in 1986, so I was 14. First woman I kissed. I’ve been very lucky like that, me being a home bird as well. She grew up around the corner.
Was she your only girlfriend?
No, I suppose we had that period when we were studying different things, and she was off travelling and I was doing various things, but we were always coming back to each other. There were plenty of interruptions (laughs).
What age were you when you had your first drink?
15 – it was after my Inter Cert. Four of us went off up to Enniskerry. This was the height of sophistication. We must have got the 44 bus up, going up the mountains, drank cider. We did a lot of drinking in fields. We didn’t drink spirits, or not much. We had snakebites on occasion – we went through that phase – but there wasn’t as much spirit drinking as you might see in more recent times.
Did you make your Confirmation?
Yeah, we went through the motions. It got to a stage where they had asked people to take the pledge silently. It’s a real Irish solution to an Irish problem, because they know that people are going to ignore it anyway so just get them to say it silently...
Did you partake in any recreational drugs growing up?
No, we smoked a bit of pot, but that’s all we did. Sometimes I was amused hearing about the supposed availability of certain drugs because I certainly didn’t see it, moving in those circles. I wasn’t interested in them. The idea of control was important. I was a fierce smoker of cigarettes, but the control thing was always on my mind. Particularly when you know you have an addictive personality and you realise that could be on another level. Maybe that’s just rationalising it, but in the suburbs that we were growing up in, there wasn’t a big drug scene. Our big thing was to get into pubs when we weren’t supposed to be there and that was the height of our ambition in relation to breaking the law. I’m sure we fecked things out of shops – we did because I was caught at one stage – but that was it. What pubs served 15-year-olds, we all knew where they were. But the drugs thing wasn’t really on our radar.
How did you do in your Leaving?
I did alright. I’m amazed these days when people talk about what constitutes a good Leaving Cert. I got As in English and History, and I thought that was great. They were the only subjects I was passionate about, but the rest of the stuff I worked hard to get myself over the line. I got a B in economics for reasons I’ve never understood, other than that I put more history into my economics answers than I did economics... which is probably the way it should be, the more I think about it.
You went on to do Arts at UCD...
Yeah, it was only down the road. So there was no big cultural transition there. I considered doing Law because I had enough points, but not in any meaningful way. So I decided to do Arts and experiment. What I found most interesting in that period was meeting the kind of people that you didn’t meet in school, of different backgrounds, from all over the country – I found that hugely liberating and stimulating. So it was great fun and we were still very young. Vincent Browne had established the College Tribune which, back then, was the only real independent newspaper in UCD and we took ourselves very seriously, in that we had a duty to our readers to maintain our independence.
Wasn’t [comedian] Dara O’Briain an editor of that paper?
No, he was the University Observer, which was the students union one. He was the same year as me. Dara specialised in debating and oratory, whereas I was much more active in the journalism.
Did you shine academically in UCD?
I did, yeah. I loved it because suddenly you realise you can do what you want to do. I came first in history in first year, and then I had to make a decision: what am I doing with this? I did history as a single subject, what used to be called ‘pure history’, which is always a smaller class. We basically did double history. There are pros and cons in that regard – too much of a good thing – but it ticked all the boxes for me because you had the history and the reading, making yourself knowledgeable about all the different aspects of history. But writing was a big part of it, so if you were interested in writing, in debating, you got all of that. These are the arguments I’d still use today about why history is a great foundation. I was lucky enough to continue doing very well, which meant eventually I was able to get a scholarship to do post-grad stuff.
You had a pretty straightforward career path...
Yeah. I’m looking at people nowadays who are mainly leaving school at 18, whereas we were finishing up our degrees at 20 and saying, “What are we going to do now?” It was an interesting time because things were starting to change a little bit, but there were still very few jobs around. The Donnelly and Morrison visas were the big tickets out. I wasn’t remotely interested in leaving the country, but I decided I needed to get out of UCD, have a gap year. It was a disaster because I said I needed to get away from UCD and get away from books, so I went to Germany with a friend of mine from college. We were supposed to be staying there and taking up a job, a mythical job, in some BMW factory. And we had to come home after a couple of weeks, broke, owing the loan that we’d taken out. So I ended up working in the bookshop in UCD. So getting away from books and UCD turned out to be working in the fucking bookshop in UCD for a year! But it was a very enjoyable year because it made me see things from different perspectives.
When did your own first book come out?
In 1995. It was a short history of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. As part of my PHD, I was looking to do a chapter on the experiences of women in rural Ireland in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and I rang the ICA, who had this big posh pad on Merrion Road, and it turned out that they had a big archive in the back garden which was rotting away. I went down and had a look at it and, to cut a long story short, it became the ICA history project. I got involved in a FÁS scheme, one of these heritage schemes where the material is archived and catalogued and there were exhibitions, and this publication came out of that. I suppose it started this interest I have in grassroots movements, and looking at the experiences of ordinary people and what they were experiencing in those decades.
Having grown up in a non-religious household, do you now believe in God?
No (shakes head).
So you’re an atheist?
Actually, I’m very exercised about this at the moment because of the kids in education and the lack of choice that’s available. Supposedly this is a new pluralistic diverse era, but the level of Church control of schools is an outrage.
My own kids go to an Educate Together school.
That wasn’t an option for us because of waiting lists and everything else. I met Brian Whiteside from the Humanist Association of Ireland last week and I had an interesting chat with him, because it made me think about the questions you’re asking. Where do you position yourself on this, because I never got exercised on agnosticism or atheism, and I don’t necessarily feel like I have to put one of those labels on it. So maybe I’m a humanist. I’ve a very open mind. I’ve spent an awful lot of time as a historian trying to understand the motivation behind religion and the power of religion, so I’m not cynical about it and I’m not disinterested, far from it. How could you be a historian in 20th century Ireland and not try and get to grips with the Church? I mean the archive of John Charles McQuaid is one of the most fascinating I’ve ever been in. But personally it’s not for me. I had a chat with Brian and he was saying that he felt – going on things like the last census returns – that more and more people were picking the option of ‘no religion’, and it’s very interesting to trace that. It’s still not a huge number nationally, but it’s a significant increase. He presides over the humanist wedding services and he said they’ve never been busier because there’s such a demand for non-church weddings.
Where did you marry Sheila?
We got married in the Unitarian Church. I was 29. Again, looking back on that, the minister there was a great guy and he allowed us to design our own ceremony and have the things we wanted there, because I just thought the registry office thing would be a bit cold and a bit empty. It’s improved hugely since, because I’ve been into those offices and they do justice to it, but at that time that was the kind of compromise we made. The Unitarian Church have their own particular beliefs, which I don’t necessarily believe in, but the way it was put to us at the time was, “Look, we’re welcoming of all.” All that stuff was swirling around – humanism, atheism, agnosticism – and I think, in relation to my own children, I want them to make up their own mind. We were allowed to make up our own minds and that’s the way I want it to continue.
You’re on one of the advisory committees for the upcoming 2016 Easter Rising commemorations. There’s been a fair amount of controversy already...
This committee was set up two years ago, and I’ve been perfectly upfront about what I felt was going on with the government. It appeared to me to tick a box: ‘we’re taking this very seriously, bringing the academics on board, so we’ll appoint ten what they call ‘distinguished historians’ and that’ll show we’re taking things seriously’. So we go in and we have various meetings about not an awful lot.
What did you want out of them?
What we repeatedly asked for was a programme to advise on, because we’re an advisory group and it’s important to make the distinction. We’re not a policymaking group. It wasn’t for us to come up with the programme and say, “Do this!” It’s not as if we own it. It was up to the State to say, “This is what we’re planning to do; could you give us your advice on X, Y and Z?” It wasn’t done, and then the programme was finally launched there last week... (shakes head despairingly).
You weren’t impressed?
We were briefed two hours before it was launched, and then this pathetic, historically illiterate video, Ireland Inspires, was released the following day. We hadn’t been shown that, either, so I was completely pissed off and made no bones about that – and I’ve every reason to be pissed off. Not because I’m being precious. I’ve never put myself in the position where I’m speaking on behalf of the group. The idea that eleven historians would agree on anything is probably a bit of a joke anyway. You were looking for a joke about historians; put eleven historians on an advisory committee and get them to agree on something, it’s not gonna happen (laughs). But they’re there because at least they can talk about the importance of context and authenticity – and that stuff is important. So then the video was brought out and it became clear that there’s a kind of marketing impulse going on, working to try to brand ‘Ireland 2016’ and that is not the way to do it, that’s a big mistake. That’s where we are at the moment but, of course, the bigger question is what’s the agenda, and who’s behind it, and who’s going to manage it?
Who is managing it?
They appointed John Concannon to spearhead ‘Ireland 2016’. I’m sure he’s a decent guy, we only met him for ten minutes the night of the launch, but it makes you realise that the government has decided, or perhaps Enda [Kenny] has decided, in his wisdom, that this is the way to go. The first thing that springs to mind is, ‘Is this a Gathering Mark II?’ Who are we shaking down this time? Are we about filling hotel beds in 2016? They’ve maintained that that’s not going to happen at all, and it’s all going to be solemn and dignified and everything else, but when you see that kind of video – it was so extraordinary the first time I saw it I thought it was a joke. When you think about the amount of piss-take stuff that goes on YouTube now, you can see why you might have thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t a joke. So that was an even bigger joke, that it wasn’t a joke. There was pretty much no mention at all of The Rising, so what are we to make of that?
So where’s it at now?
The draft programme is there, and there’s good stuff in it, because we made the point at the outset... I’m not remotely interested in military parades, personally. I’m not going to get exercised about that sort of stuff. There’s going to be all sorts of fights and the relatives are already going off in different directions, in different groups. And there’s the real relatives and the continuity relatives and the provisional relatives, as we’ve been joking about. There’s the relatives of the signatories, and there’s the relatives of those who were in the GPO, and the relatives of those who were affected by all sorts. Very smart people, many of them, and they’ve got very good ideas, but they can also get very precious.
How so?
The keepers of the flame can sometimes be very fractious and very pious and very high-handed. Some of them. I don’t want to generalise, because there’s a lot of decent people there who want to do the right thing, which is to do this justice by being dignified and not allowing people to hijack it. There’s so many potential groups who would be lining up to hijack it.
You don’t agree that any member of the British monarchy should be invited over.
No, not at all. This was a typical rush of blood to the head of senior civil servants, who were intoxicated on the peace process. That’s not in any way belittling the importance of the peace process, far from it. But they had decided that Anglo-Irish relations are now so good that the cherry on the cake would be the return of a British royal for 2016. So they stitched it into the speech of Michael D. Higgins when he was over in Britain in April. That was the first that anybody had heard of it – including, of course, our group, and that raises another issue for me. That was a serious initiative and, again, we’re not policy makers, we’re not speechwriters, so they could quite legitimately say, “Why would we tell you about highly sensitive Department of Foreign Affairs agendas?” But I knew straightaway when I heard, that that was ultimately going to be about the peace process and 2016 being two sides of the same coin, which they ain’t, and shouldn’t be. So it’s not a good idea for loads of reasons.
Such as?
It’s not appropriate in the sense that what you’re marking in 2016 is the declaration of an Irish republic in 1916. It’s the very antithesis of a monarchy, and for all of the improvements in Anglo-Irish relations, we can’t ignore the very difficult history between the two countries. So that’s one part; the other part is that that becomes the focus, it creates exclusion, it creates a security lockdown if they were to have a prominent role. And it annoys people. People in a general way might say, “Oh, come on – get over yourself!” and I can see their perspective that it is healthy for the two countries, but not for this kind of thing. This should not be about us believing that we have to prove something to the world, that we’re capable of this forgiveness and reconciliation. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s a postcolonial inferiority complex at the heart of it, in my view, which we could do without. We’ve got enough on our bloody plates without that kind of craven stuff – and that’s what I think it is.
2016 is also marking the centenary of a revolution. Do you think we’re living in revolutionary times again?
No. I’ve been thinking about the Irish winter of discontent. It might earn that phrase – there’s no shortage of discontent – but what does it actually mean? I’ve been thinking about this for the last six years, from the beginning of the financial crisis and all that came in its wake. I’ve lost count of the number of journalists from abroad who were very interested in what the Irish people might do and they’d often say, “Why aren’t the Irish people more angry? Why aren’t they storming the barricades? Why aren’t they doing what they’re doing in Spain or Greece?” And I’d say, “Well, do you want the short answer or the long answer? Do you want the historical context or do you want a soundbite?”
What’s the soundbite?
There isn’t a soundbite, but let’s stop talking as if there’s a revolutionary sentiment. For example, a Guardian journalist was talking about the ‘revolution’ that had occurred through the ballot box at the last general election. I said to him, “Would you hang on a minute now? We’ve swapped Fianna Fail for Fine Gael and Labour. That’s not a revolution!” It’s revenge, yes. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the ballot box – we’ve a very long tradition of it. People forget that when we look at Greece and we look at Spain and we look at Portugal, they’re much more recent democracies in the modern sense than we are. We had that stability at an earlier stage, and the primacy attached to that process, and they didn’t.
They had military dictatorships under the likes of Franco...
Yeah. It’s only the ‘70s – you’re talking about ‘74, ’75 for Portugal and Spain and Greece, it’s later again. These are relatively new developments, so there’s much more volatility. What happened in this country also was the space for potential radical activity was narrowed, partly because of the dominance of certain institutions, whether it was Fianna Fáil or the Catholic Church, and partly because of emigration because so many people left.
So do you think an Irish revolution would be more likely if 300,000 young people hadn’t emigrated?
This is the interesting thing about trying to characterise what’s going on at the moment. What does it actually represent? If you look at protest movements in other countries, they might be seen as general anti-austerity protests, or general huge anger with bad governance or poor leadership or whatever it is, and we could talk about a number of varieties of those things, but is what we’re seeing at the moment actually a broad-based nationwide anti-austerity movement? It’s hard to see that it is. Is it a revolutionary movement? It’s hard to see that it is.
Some of the figureheads at the protests might disagree with you there...
Paul Murphy’s looking far too smug at the moment in relation to how he’s responding to what has happened, and how he’s characterising it, because he’s suddenly making all these generalisations about the Irish people. I’m always wary of this. I was also wary of it when it was, “Oh, the Irish lost the run of themselves...” or else “we did this... we did that.” Hugely problematic assertions on both sides. So a revolution? No.
You don’t seem overly impressed with the leaders of the anti-austerity campaigns?
If you look at the history of revolutions, they’re started by younger people, so you can see people looking at the potential that might be there at the moment for building this into something bigger. But take, for example, the people who are involved in the broad anti-austerity label... they’re really deeply split amongst each other. You’ve the Socialist Party, Anti-Austerity Alliance, People Before Profit – and they fight like cats and dogs. The stuff that goes on behind the scenes is embarrassing, in relation to who can speak first or second or third at which rally. They’re not necessarily representing as coherent a group as they claim to be. I’ve been asked a lot over the years, “Why don’t the Irish do protests?” Well, they do in certain ways, but it can often be very sectioned. They protest about hospitals in a certain area, they’ll protest about water charges, they’ll protest about medical cards, but developing that into something bigger that would actually threaten the stability of the State is different. There’s been an awful lot of exaggeration in the last few weeks about anarchy. The word ‘anarchy’ is all over the papers. Throwing a water balloon at Joan Burton hardly amounts to anarchy. There’s a nastiness to it, and some of the abuse that has been heaped not just on politicians, but people who are working in Irish Water, for example, or as Gardaí, there’s far too much racist and sexist and homophobic abuse being thrown at them. These things develop heat on their own. Whether they represent something much bigger is still an open question. But I doubt it.
Are you going to pay your water charges?
Yes, I will pay water charges because I don’t have a problem with it in principle. I’ve a huge problem, as most people do, with the way it’s been handled. I think the tax is a very regressive tax and I think what’s been done now is a joke. It’s the worst of all worlds, because it’s an Irish solution to an Irish problem and it’s a political solution to what’s not just a political problem, it’s something much bigger than that. The reason I would pay water charges is because I believe, in principle, we should be paying for water to get us thinking very differently about conservation. The biggest crisis that’s facing us, as with the rest of the planet, is global warming. So when we come up with this Irish political solution to the Irish problem, we’re not seeing this big picture at all.
Is that not underestimating the anger people feel about the imposition of Irish Water?
I’m not underestimating for a moment how pissed off and angry people are about how badly governed they have been, in many respects. Everything the government touches at the moment seems to crumble, and there’s a real lack of coherence there and leadership. All very high-sounding clichés, but they’re true – so they deserve to be feeling the heat at the moment. But nobody deserves to be incarcerated or physically assaulted.
You lectured in Boston College for a year. Were you there when the ill-fated Belfast Project archive was being put together?
Interestingly, it was going on in the background. There was great secrecy around it. We were told a few times, (whispers) “Boston College has a very important project going on with former paramilitaries, and they’re being taped for posterity.” And I thought that it was actually a very good idea. It was done in this country, which people forget, after the War of Independence, but they did it in the 1940s and ‘50s. They collected statements from the survivors. It was called the Bureau of Military History, and do you know when they were released? 2003! Now what those gobshites did was they didn’t get proper legal advice. They went and did these interviews, and do you know what the agreement was? “We won’t release these tapes until you’re dead.” If I made an agreement with you that I’ll talk to you as long as you don’t release this until I die, on the understanding that that will be well into the distant future, so that it would be history and not current affairs, what happns if I walk out and get hit by a bus and die? That’s the fundamental mistake they made. They didn’t get proper advice. They kept it secret.
Why?
There were people who were pushing their own agendas, because they wanted this material either for journalistic reasons or for political reasons... and the whole thing was a mess. It could have been a very valuable project. So they got the worst of all worlds then, because it became an issue for practices and procedures in relation to oral history, which were embarrassing for those involved. Remember, the history department in Boston College wasn’t even consulted about this. There were particular individuals within Boston College, who were trying to control this for themselves and, again, they got high on their own sense of importance. They thought they were players in the peace process, and they made fools out of themselves.
Where does that stand now?
As far as I’m aware, there were a number of legal issues around whether or not the material could be given to the police – and they got it, as far as I know. I’m not sure of the latest twist in that, but as far as I know they were given permission to get access to the material by a court. (The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal against the decision, arrived at in the US Federal Courts, that interviews germane to the investigation into the murder of Jean McConville had to be given to the PSNI – Ed).
Given the reputed number of touts on both sides during The Troubles, I’d imagine they already knew most of it anyway.
Well, they do. And again it’s part of a bigger difficulty for Adams and his generation: what’s history and what’s current affairs? Adams has such a profile now: he’s now a TD. These investigations, in theory at least, are still ongoing, so you have this clash between what’s supposed to be historical events, but which are really part of current affairs. If I had been advising Adams a few years ago, I would have said, “Get out now.” Again, I’m looking back at how republicans of the past managed the transition from an era of violence to constitutional politics, and you have to make certain decisions. For Sinn Fein, I think one of those decisions should have been that you’re going to constantly come up against this clash of history and current affairs if you remain at the helm. What they’re doing at the moment is trying to have both history, and the attachment to history, and the importance of where they’ve come from through the person of Gerry Adams and their new political project – and that’s why these things keep coming up.
They seem to be weathering the storm pretty well.
Well, ‘Teflon Gerry’ has been able withstand all of this, but I also feel that in the process he’s made complete eejits out of the younger Sinn Féin TDs, and it is extraordinary the way the control over the party works in that regard. Thinking back on this, the only dissenting voice within Sinn Fein was over abortion. Peader Tóibín was told the Sinn Fein party line is ‘we’re not supporting this’ – and he couldn’t toe the party line and that for them is a big deal, so they turfed him out for a couple of months. That was the only dissenting voice in Sinn Fein, which is extraordinary when you think about some of the issues that have come up in recent times: here was a blanket silence or else a blanket backing. It doesn’t reflect well on certain people’s independence of mind...