Although Sinn Féin are proud apologists for murderers, torturers and other criminals of various stripes, they are vulnerable to ridicule. Vain people like Gerry Adams cannot bear to be laughed at. So as a matter of principle I welcome every opportunity to show them for the clowns they are.
Published: 29 May 2025
I am, therefore, delighted by their hilarious indignation about European plans to acknowledge the thousandth birthday of William the Conqueror.
The Normandy Region Council invited Britain, southern Italy, Denmark, Norway and other parts of Europe with a shared Norman heritage to join a European cultural initiative called ‘2027 – The Year of the Normans’.
The Normans, who were Vikings, under William achieved supreme power in England in 1066, by pretty well annihilating the Anglo-Saxons, and going on to transform the society they now controlled.
William, said Winston Churchill, was “a prime exponent of the doctrine of mass terrorism through the spectacle of bloody and merciless examples” and the use of wholescale destruction.
A century later they would continue to Ireland, then dominated by warring minor and major kings, following an invitation to Henry II from the King of Leinster who had been dispossessed by the High King.
The king’s daughter was married off to Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, whose army began a conquest of Ireland as thorough as that in England through brutality and intermarriage.
Common Irish names these days include those of Norman origin like Barry, Butler, Birmingham, Fitzgerald, Power and Roche.
As do such later planter names as Adams.
People have marvelled for a millenium throughout Europe at the castles, towns, abbeys and cathedrals the Normans created.
But the Sinn Fein website has a photo in front of the Dail of various shocked and self-righteous Shinners horrified that the Fianna Fail heritage minister had welcomed the initiative to acknowledge the “monumental” mark left by the Normans on Europe “in a respectful, sensitive way”.
Their cultural spokesman Aengus Ó Snodaigh produced a prime example of his party’s mean-spiritedness, ignorance and cynicism.
“We Irish know well enough the legacy of William’s successors invading and subjugating Ireland in the name of the English crown, with Strongbow ushering in the 900 years of occupation, with the North still under the descendants of William the Conqueror’s crown”.
So Ireland should not be celebrating “the birth of a future English king”.
While “We should make the most of Ireland’s Norman heritage to boost tourism, to protect jobs, to support communities, and reinforce links with families tracing their Norman Irish roots and with other places who share a Norman heritage, but celebrating England’s William the Conqueror, however, is a step too far.”
No one is ‘celebrating’. They are ‘commemorating’.
“Like it or not” said the distinguished Trinity historian Jane Ohlmeyer, “the past is no longer in the past, it is in the present. It is critical that we use opportunities like this one to better understand the nature of the conquest and to reflect on its legacies.”
William repented in his last years, increasingly conscious of his mortality and fearing for his immortal soul: he gave up the hunting he loved as penance and endowed more monasteries.
Would that Sinn Fein’s heroes would do the same.
