Nigel Farage and Sinn Féin are bedfellows when it comes to
Europe
One of the longest running fake news stories in Irish politics
is the canard that the country is about to be forced into a non-existent
European army. Sinn Féin and a variety of other anti-EU campaigners have been
proclaiming it since the very first referendum on membership in 1972.
The spurious claim surfaced as long ago as the 1972 referendum
campaign on EEC membership. “Irish people will be committed to whatever wars
the European superpowers decide to wage. Neutrality will go and compulsory
military service for our youth will be introduced,” said a Sinn Féin pamphlet.
They are still beating the same hollow drum half a century later.
Sinn Féin’s more recent definition of
itself as a Euro critical rather than a Eurosceptic party has been put in
context by the fact that Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is using clips from
speeches by Mary Lou McDonald when she was a member of the European Parliament
to support its European election campaign in the UK.
During the debate in the first referendum on the Lisbon Treaty
in 2008 McDonald claimed it would give “powerful EU institutions a free hand to
further militarise our union”. These claims helped to create a public mood
which led to the rejection of the treaty by the Irish electorate the first time
around.
Fianna Fáil European candidate for Midlands-North-West Brendan
Smith, who has also tried to focus public attention on the long history of Sinn
Féin’s anti-EU rhetoric, was right to suggest that that the Brexit Party’s use
of McDonald’s speeches should not come as any surprise.
“For those who have listened to the party’s recent claims to be
pro-European, the emergence of this video is a timely reminder of the real
values at the heart of Sinn Féin,” said Smith who pointed that while the Lisbon
Treaty was rejected by voters at the first time of asking, it was passed in a
second referendum after legal assurances about Irish neutrality.
Backhanded compliment
Sinn Féin may find the backhanded compliment from Farage
unwelcome but it is not the first time the two forces have found common ground.
Back in 2012 during the referendum on the EU Fiscal Treaty, which Sinn Féin
strongly campaigned against, McDonald and Farage appeared together calling for
a No vote in a national radio debate on Today FM chaired by Matt Cooper.
Fox may have moved
from being a communist to a Euro candidate for a populist right-wing party but
another thing that hasn’t changed is her virulent anti-EU views
Incidentally, another bizarre link between the Brexit Party and
Sinn Féin has become something of an election issue in the north of England. The
controversial journalist Claire Fox, who tops the list of Brexit Party
candidates for the North West constituency in England, is a former member of a
Trotskyist group called the Revolutionary Communist Party.
That party was a strong defender of the IRA even after it had
planted the Warrington bomb which killed 12-year-old Tim Parry and Johnathan
Ball. When controversy developed after her selection as a Brexit Party
candidate she contacted Parry’s father Colin to explain her position.
He later tweeted: “I give some credit to @Fox_Claire for having
the gumption to call me today but the fact that she repeatedly refused to
disavow her comments supporting the IRA bombing which took Tim’s and
Johnathan’s young lives proves she hasn’t changed her original views.”
Fox may have moved from being a communist to a Euro candidate
for a populist right-wing party but another thing that hasn’t changed is her
virulent anti-EU views. It is no accident that the hard left and the populist
right share the same animosity to the core EU values of tolerance, free trade
and the respect for law. Both will do everything they can in the next European
Parliament to undermine those principles.
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