The title of Máiría Cahill’s searing account of sexual abuse describes, at one level, the appalling individual allegedly responsible. At another, it is a reference to WB Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
The group whose hour has come round at last is Sinn Féin, now the largest party in Northern Ireland and soon to be the biggest in the Republic as well. In the latter, only an unlikely coalition between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael has, since 2020, kept Sinn Féin out of office, while in the north, only the collapse of the Stormont executive prevents them nominating the First Minister to run the province.
It is an astonishing electoral advance for a party that for decades was the political front for a terrorist organisation, however much it tried to pretend otherwise. The Cahill name was prominent in the republican movement. Joe Cahill was a founder of the Provisional IRA; Máiría, the author of Rough Beast (★★★★☆), is his great niece.
Given her background, and where she lived in Belfast, Máiría was targeted for recruitment by the IRA, which she resisted, but she did work in Sinn Féin’s HQ from the age of 16. Her aunt’s husband was an alleged prominent Provisional called Martin Morris, whom Máiría accused of abusing her at their home. But when she told the IRA high command what had happened, they refused to believe her until further allegations were made by other, even younger, girls. The IRA then carried out their own investigation, exercising a bogus right to act as the judge and jury in Nationalist communities even after the end of the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement. They wouldn’t let Cahill go to the police, and Morris went to ground.
