A rainy day is a good day for a funeral, they say in Ireland. And on Monday morning, aged 95 years, Rosaleen Sands was laid to rest in the quiet corner of Belfast city cemetery.
On May 5, 1981, her son, Bobby had died while on hunger strike — the first of 10 Irish Republican prisoners to starve themselves to death, to try and win recognition of a political status that the terrorists then engaged in a bitter violent political feud with Britain over its involvement in Northern Ireland. That struggle claimed more than 3,600 lives over three decades of conflict, and its repercussions are being felt till today.
As far as the then United Kingdom prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was concerned, Sands and all the paramilitary members jailed under special anti-terror legislation and in courts that cut corners on normal legal and judicial standards, were common criminals.
A month before Sands died, he had been elected a member of parliament for Fermanagh at Westminster. It was a watershed and seminal moment in Irish and UK history, garnering international attention and stinging criticism for the manner in which British authorities had responded to the crisis. It was an event that propelled Sinn Fein and its leadership under Gerry Adams, to the top of the political cause celeb charts, advancing support for that group’s brand of violent Irish nationalism, and winning financial donations for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) from misinformed, misguided and hardly sober Irish Americans in bars from Boston to the Bronx and Baltimore.
Sands was a charismatic man with a way with words. He said of the British security services at the time: “They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken.”
Last week, as I sat in a West End of London theatre, watching a wholly engaging production of The Ferryman, Jez Butterworth’s fine take on absence, loss and family, set against the backdrop of that bitter hunger strike, Sands’ words were quoted. And they are still capable of making a powerful and dramatic point about the human spirit so many years after the real and painful context of those events.
Alan Black is a man who has many painful memories of those dark days, and he bears the scars today of 18 gunshot wounds on his body. Black was the only survivor of the so-called Kingsmill massacre, an event that occurred on the dark evening of January 5, 1976. There were 12 men travelling in a minibus when it was stopped by an IRA gang. One Roman Catholic on board was allowed go free. The other 11 were riddled with bullets, and Black was the only one to survive, frightfully injured. Ironically, when the gunmen asked from behind their balaclavaed faces: “Who is the Catholic?”, those on board feared he would be singled out for execution, and they pleaded for his life. They were gunned down instead. Sadly, it was one of many horrific attacks that took place during the Troubles, as that period of political and sectarian violence in Ireland is commonly known.
And earlier this month, as the 42nd anniversary of that massacre approached, another Sinn Fein MP was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Barry McElduff posted a video on social media where he posed with a loaf of Kingsmill bread on his head as he supposedly couldn’t find any.
Black was horrified, and raised the alarm.
Sinn Fein tried to play down the video, but as Black later told Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE, “[McElduff’s] a very astute politician. He’s a very clever man ... He done it deliberately to cause hurt and he succeeded in spades in the hurt that he caused.”
Sinn Fein suspended McElduff from the party for three months and hoped that the storm would go away. It didn’t, and coincidently, as Rosaleen Sands, the mother of a man of honour, was being laid to rest, McElduff quietly tendered his resignation as an MP in the House of Commons.
Here’s the thing, though. Technically, an MP cannot resign.
The House of Commons is a bizarre place, in part for those elected there, but more so for the historic rules, conventions and procedures that govern day-to-day activities. In a ruling dating all the way back to 1624 and a time when King James I was sitting on the English throne, parliament passed a resolution that its members are not allowed to resign their sets of their own will. As it stands since March 2 of that fourth year in the reign of King James, an MP can only vacate his seat if he dies, if he is expelled by the House of Commons, or is disqualified. And there are only two ways to be disqualified: Either the initial election is voided; or the MP accepts one of a number of paid positions that are “incompatible with Membership of the House of Commons”.
Here’s what a House of Commons spokesperson said in explaining the rationale to the Belfast Telegraph. “As an MP cannot directly ‘resign’ their seat, they have to be appointed to a paid office of the Crown, which automatically disqualifies the Member from holding a seat in the House of Commons,” he said. “Mr McElduff would therefore be appointed to the position of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds.”
It’s not the first time this anomaly of antiquity has arisen. When Adams, along with the late Martin McGuiness resigned from Westminster in 2011 and 2013 respectively, they had to do so by being appointed Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead respectively.
The spokesman added that the announcement of McElduff’s new appointment would be made by the Speaker of the House of Commons in due course.
Between the passing of Mrs Sands, The Ferryman in the West End, the idiotic video of a Sinn Fein MP wearing a loaf of bread on his head, and the wounds still borne by Mr Black, it is small wonder indeed that we cannot let the painful and dark chapters of the past slip beneath the murky and stilled waters of time. Ireland is a land with too much history and not enough geography. And more’s the pity.
