In the last couple of weeks Martin Mc Guinness, who is Queen Elizabeth’s Deputy First Minister in the Belfast Assembly
has:
- helped open the new IKEA store just outside Belfast.
- tried to persuade Donald Trump to build his golf course in Ireland rather than Scotland
- met George Bush
You can see from the jubilant picture of Belfast’s mayor, Ian Paisley and Mc Guinness that none of them has ever spent a Saturday being forced to trudge round an IKEA store. A volcanic loathing of every bastard in the place builds up inside and a hatred of smug Swedish home designers making you want to stab the next person you meet called Sven. Well that’s what it does for me.
There was a time when McGuinness would have argued that it was the patriotic duty of every Irish rebel to blow up IKEA stores. Derry IRA seemed convinced that the road to liberation required the demolition of the city’s retail sector at a time when McGuinness was closely identified with the organisation. The golf course business is worse. You could make a case that Irish people need more interior decor options than Woolworths and the local pound shop and that’s why IKEA is beneficial. Golf courses are for rich people. Donald Trump’s Irish golf course, which he intends to build near the Giant’s Causeway, would be for the super rich, with maybe some of the Provies who are on the gravy train being given a discount rate. A few hundred locals would be employed as 
waiters,waitresses and toilet attendants to the millionaire clientele. This is a third world tourist development model.
It’s the meeting with George Bush that provides the political explanation to all this. McGuinness and Sinn Fein are US and British imperialism’s little gombeen helpers. A rapidly shrinking group of people in Britain, who cannot have been following Irish politics, still see them as vaguely on the left. For example they had a speaker at a recent conference in London on Latin America. At the same time they are offering to take part in US organised talks in Iraq to help co-opt a section of the opposition.
Mc Guinness should have pulled out of politics when he was ahead. No one looks at Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain and regrets their declining later years. McGuinness has become the comedy Irish politician ready to bend the knee to any imperialist warlord, multinational exploiter of third world labour or weird billionaire and reminded us all again of just how free of ideology Irish republicanism is.
Liam redux 
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