![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www1.thedissenter.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/mandela-1_edited-1-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Gerry Adams can\u2019t have been overly\u00a0happy with the analogies and eulogies to Martin McGuinness as Ireland\u2019s Mandela – it always seemed that that was an accolade that Gerry had sought to appropriate for himself.<\/p>\n
Of course it is still possible to question the comparison with Mandela to McGuinness, especially in relative Party contexts.<\/p>\n
The links with the ANC go back to the efforts of the IRA<\/a> to position itself politically in the trendy left lexicon of the then fashionable liberation movements such as the PLO, ANC, FSLN et al.<\/p>\n More recent IRA association with murderous militias has been less clear cut<\/a>.<\/p>\n Not that the rosy comparison with other revolutionary movements has been entirely accepted by all. Here is Fintan O\u2019Toole back in 1998<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026though Irish republicans would like to think otherwise, the analogy between themselves and Kenyatta or Mandela is not in fact valid. The IRA\u2019s campaign has not been a war of national liberation, waged on behalf of the majority against an oppressive minority or a foreign power. Its enemies have not been illegitimate regimes but two liberal democracies\u2014the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland\u2014and the majority Protestant population in Northern Ireland itself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The most recent iteration of Irish Republicanism likes to focus on rights, taking the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as its chrysalis (before the butterfly<\/a>). Unionists are too willing to accept that the Civil Rights movement was in its conception a republican plot. The foundation of the Civil Rights was to campaign for equal citizenship within the UK, not the destruction of the State.\u00a0Sure the radical left of the period and elements of the IRA shared common cause; this endured even when the violence started.<\/p>\n Nor did the University students that vocalized the civil rights campaign have much to do with the working class. From that environment of leftie-chic, a nationalist middle-class was too willingly, and remains, attached to the politics of grievance and victimhood: rhetorical by nature, but ultimately alienating when responses are never enough and intentions never accepted as genuine.\u00a0For Irish Republicanism this\u00a0was the entry point for its\u00a0Trojan horse<\/a>.<\/p>\n The issues that gave rise to the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland were largely addressed by the early 1970s; certainly the structural reforms were complete. Whatever the grievances that were inherent to the Civil Rights campaign, they did not deny the young Martin McGuinness free education, free health care and a social welfare net if needed \u2013 not available to black South Africans living under apartheid.<\/p>\n Accepting the Civil Rights movement as being essentially \u2018Republican\u2019 only serves Irish Republican appropriation of a non-violent movement to justify its murderous campaign. As Dr Phillip McGarry said recently<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026no respectable independent body has ever argued nor could argue that the violence of the loyalists and republicans was a legitimate or remotely proportionate response to those wrongs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That aside, there are bigger questions in the comparison of Mandela and McGuinness that perhaps Irish Republicans haven\u2019t entirely thought through.<\/p>\n From the press coverage over these past few weeks of McGuinness political role in the past few decades has been portrayed as central to Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. The strategy and development of Sinn Fein as a political force, and partner in a (sort of) power-sharing Government, has been presented as the consequence of McGuinness\u2019s vision, and broadly his alone. Like Mandela, McGuinness may in time become associated with an outcome as it might have been, rather than the actuality.<\/p>\n The ready comparison of McGuinness with Mandela arises from the way in which Sinn Fein has in the past placed itself alongside the ANC, such as here:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www1.thedissenter.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Composite-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n