The problem with the SNP’s separatist sympathies

In September 2003, John Swinney — fighting to save his first outing as leader of the SNP — flared at its annual conference that his party would “get the Brits off our backs.”

Rhetoric straight from Northern Ireland and which has no legitimacy in the politics of Scotland.

Shortly after Swinney, now First Minister, won the Scottish Parliament election in May, he crowed publicly that the devolved administrations of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast were all now helmed by Nationalist parties.

Indeed, in May the SNP was represented at a Dublin convocation: assorted parties discussing tactics in the unthinkable event of a Farage government.

The political illiteracy of this is breathtaking. The SNP pursues a “sovereignty” that would replace the democratic command of Westminster with the unaccountable writ of Brussels. Plaid Cymru is essentially an ethno-Nationalist Welsh-language party. And Sinn Féin wants Northern Ireland run by another state altogether.

The only proper response is derision. 

Nor has Sinn Féin ever deplored the bloody fruits of “physical force” Republicanism. Police commanders in Belfast and Dublin have alleged that the party is still overseen by the “Army Council” of the Provisional IRA. Had Swinney even remembered that 114 Scottish soldiers were slain in the Troubles?

On 21 May the First Minister doubled down. He had “no intention” of apologising for his assertion that people have “got to move on.” It is no doubt his view that the men of violence downed tools, more or less, after the Good Friday Agreement and that physical-force Republicanism no longer menaces anyone in the province.

It’s a widely held view. But wholly mistaken. From Derry to Belfast, pockets of Tyrone and certain glens in Armagh, Republicans still police — and prey upon — their communities and to their own ends.

And Scotland is far more entangled in this than we care to think. She was long cherished as a welcome source of funds, hide-outs and safe-houses. Her ferries to Larne and Belfast were a useful channel for arms.

When the police finally late in 1984 cornered Patrick McGee — the “Brighton Bomber” who, weeks earlier, had nearly killed Margaret Thatcher — it was in a Glasgow flat. 

We now know that from an early point in the Troubles it was the settled decision of the Provos never to attack targets in Scotland. It was too useful to them as things stood and the risks of, say, killing a Catholic police officer was too great. 

As Martin McGuinness, IRA Chief of Staff and Northern Officer Commanding, told Willie Carlin — an MI5 agent who had infiltrated Sinn Féin: 

The Scots were disenfranchised, just the same as the Irish … They haven’t got the balls that we have to fight for self-determination.

The New IRA still raises money in Glasgow for its political wing, Saoradh: on a good match-day outside Celtic Park, a £2,500 take is typical. At the finale of a Republican march in Glasgow last July, one James Murphy — visiting from over the water — extolled the New IRA, to much applause.

Scots may well wish to “move on” from the IRA — the IRA has assuredly not moved on from us. It is all the odder as, for obvious reasons, the SNP leadership had nothing to do with the horrors of Northern Ireland.

When, in 1981, documents leaked from the 79 Group — a left-wing SNP faction then boasting such youthful pillars as Alex Salmond, Roseanna Cunningham and Kenny MacAskill — attested to dealings with Sinn Féin, the Group was swiftly proscribed and its lieutenants (temporarily) expelled.

All this raises far more substantive — and troubling — questions than Peter Murrell’s bewildering larceny; it has had nothing like that scrutiny – and, if he believes everyone in Ireland has moved on, John Swinney really ought to visit Mullaghmore in County Sligo.

This village is cherished by bathers, surfers and yachtsmen. And on Monday 27 August 1979 a man in his eightieth year took some family out on a boating-trip from Mullaghmore harbour; to check a few lobster-pots, dip the odd fishing-line.

They had barely cleared the port when someone atop the cliffs — well aware there were elderly folk and kids aboard — pressed a button.

He blew the Shadow V craft to kingdom come, in an operation doubtless approved by Martin McGuinness. 

By his death in 2017 and in a new order, there had long been determined efforts to reinvent McGuinness as a sort of national treasure. 

But that Monday and by his nod, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, his 14 year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, Paul Maxwell — a happy 15 year-old boat-boy from Enniskillen — and a little dog called Twiga were killed instantly. 

By breakfast on Tuesday, the Dowager Countess Brabourne, 83, had died from her injuries. “I lay in the bed beside her with wounds from head to toe,” Nicholas’s twin Timothy recalled laconically in 2009.

“Opposite, my mother was connected to a machine that breathed for her; she was not expected to live. Her face was unrecognisable, held together by 117 stitches, twenty in each eye. 

“In a nearby ward lay my father, his legs twisted and broken and multiple wounds all over his body. Between the three survivors, we had three functioning eyes and no working eardrum s…”

In October 2019, back in Mullaghmore, I was moved to find some memorials — an interpretive plaque; a granite monument with a cross — had just been erected to commemorate the 1979 outrage.

But an informational plaque by the harbour has never mentioned the most infamous event in local history. Too close, you see, to certain pockets of militant Republicanism: Kiltyclogher, Kinlough, Bundoran.

By my return in 2020, the cross and granite monument had vanished. The plaque further along the cliffs had been rubbed into erasure.By my last visit, in 2023, there was nothing. For men presumably proud of their feats, Provos seem to hate folk remembering them.

Pressed on the Mountbatten bombing in 2021, Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald could but whine: “I am sorry, of course, that happened.” Much in the way, as one observer snorted, that you’d apologise for neglecting to feed a neighbour’s cat while they were away.

The Provisional IRA was just getting started. The Warrenpoint ambush, on the border with the Republic and on the northern side of the Newry River, was another South Armagh Brigade job. At twenty to five this same Monday afternoon, as a British Army convoy trundled past Narrow Water Castle, an 800 lb fertiliser bomb hidden in straw bales detonated in an enormous explosion.

It caught the last truck. Six soldiers were killed instantly. All that was left of the driver — Private Anthony Wood, 19 — was his pelvis.

Officers, amidst the screams and carnage, set up an incident command-point at the stone gateway on the opposite side of the road — as the IRA knew they would. Thirty-two minutes after the first blast, another huge bomb hidden in milk churns went off. Twelve soldiers were slain, including two Queen’s Own Highlanders. All ever found of Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair was an epaulette. 

We have not the space to explore the complexities of the north of Ireland through these decades of killing – atrocities on both sides, grave British mistakes, Stormont’s wretched record on Catholic civil rights and Whitehall’s refusal – till Thatcher’s time – to give the Province studied attention.

First Minister, has Northern Ireland really moved on?

There were startling alliances in May as mobs took to mean Belfast streets, Taigs and Prods happily — together — burning out houses and terrorising recent immigrants in the wake of a horrific attempted murder.

But an old order is still very much in control — its hard-eyed men still intimidate and maim.

Margaret, of Crumlin Road – a Protestant loath to share her surname – on 10 June confided to Max Jeffery: ‘‘My friends from work are all Catholics … and they have the same worries as me about immigration … But they’re not allowed to say so because the IRA still have a grip.”

Splinters and remnants of past, murderous Republicanism — and, still, some thuggish Loyalists — yet profit in organised crime, and exact punishments dreadful indeed for lads (mostly lads) who cross them.

Meanwhile, a new generation bops and gyrates to the hip-hop band Kneecap; actually pines for the good old days of the Troubles. Y’know — sort of edgy and cool and that?

South Armagh has much beautiful countryside. But, decades back, it was “Bandit Country.” A maze of hedged lanes and roads, largely in the grip of families who had been chanting |up the ‘RA” since St Patrick had banished the snakes. 124 British soldiers were killed within a brief radius of just one town — Crossmaglen. But they were not the only killings deemed expedient.

Breege Quinn still cries as she speaks of her son, who died at the hands of Republicans. She knows who killed him. She sees them in the shops. Even at Mass. “They wouldn’t look me straight in the eye… they look away,” she says.

Paul Quinn, 21, was not murdered in, say, 1972 or 1986. Paul Quinn died in 2007 because he had fallen foul in some bar of some IRA warlord. 

What was latterly the Real IRA had become a criminal organisation, smuggling subsidised agricultural diesel across the border and selling it at fat profit. 

Lured to a shed, Paul was set upon by ten thugs in boiler-suits and balaclavas. He was beaten with iron bars and nail-studded clubs till they had broken every bone in his body. They then poured disinfectant into the wounds (to remove incriminating DNA.)

That evening, Paul died in hospital. “I’m sorry,” an anguished doctor told his parents. “They left nothing to fix.”

Might our First Minister like to swing by Crossmaglen, sit down with Breege Quinn and tell her, in that Edinburgh drone we all know so well, she really should move on?

In May 2015, a prince came quietly to Sligo. Attended a service of reconciliation. Gazed over the Atlantic waves where his beloved grand-uncle had perished, and toured the new Peace Garden in a former convent.

A handsome granite bench there is the only monument left. “Healing is possible,” it reads, “even when the heartache is continuous — Prince Charles, Sligo, 2015.”

Breege Quinn has a fiercer hope. That her boy’s killers be tormented in their dreams. That they:

… have to think about what they did to Paul in that shed. They have to hear his screeching and begging them to stop.