Denying the existence of the country in which they hold office

In the early days of the devolved executive, one of the new Sinn Féin ministers, Conor Murphy, reportedly issued guidance to his civil service staff to ‘use language he was comfortable with’ in speeches and statements issued in his name. In particular, staff were asked to refer to Northern Ireland as ‘here’ or ‘the North’, and the Irish Republic as ‘all-Ireland’. The resulting political row was predictable, and echoed the familiar controversies surrounding place-names and titles that had long been a feature of public life in the region.

While some found amusement in the minister's attempts to redefine the region's constitutional status through place-names, one Unionist response to the memo unwittingly made a telling assessment of the New Sinn Féin project. In suggesting that ‘Mr Murphy appeared to be trying to deny the existence of the country in which he holds office’, the DUP MP Gregory Campbell pointed to a central contradiction within Provisional strategy. Conor Murphy's attempt to re-order reality was just one small example of a Republican politics of denial that sought to claim in the realm of discourse victories that had not been won on the fields of power.

In the early days of devolution, Unionists were fond of highlighting similar contrasts between Republican rhetoric and political reality. Jeffrey Donaldson, for example, described Martin McGuinness's claims that Republicans ‘have now entered the end phase of our struggle … [and] begun the countdown to a united Ireland’ as ‘feeble rhetoric’. For Unionists, such rhetoric masked: