With the deftness of a magician wriggling free from a straitjacket, Sinn Fein ditched its universalist aspirations and reinvented itself as a municipal party of victimhood. A brilliant new book takes the party to task. by Kevin Rooney Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams’ tribute in May to former Irish Republican Army leader Brian Keenan, in which he described Keenan as a peacemaker, revealed much about the party’s retrospective redefinition of its long struggle against British rule in Ireland. Speaking at Keenan’s funeral, Adams suggested that Keenan lived long enough to see his goals realised: ‘Achieving a power-sharing administration with the Reverend Ian Paisley as First Minister would not have been possible but for the work of Brian Keenan.’ I grew up in West Belfast in the next street to Keenan. Before he rose to relative...
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