By Editorial
Copyright newsletter
A key thing to remember about Michelle O’Neill is that the tag ‘first minister for all’ is one that she gave herself. Sinn Fein’s Stormont leader is not slow to praise herself, or to scold others. The title first minister for all is not one that unionists will recognise. She has commemorated Provisional IRA terrorists (for example last year paying tribute to a trio who accidentally blew themselves up in the 1970s). It might be that Ms O’Neill is not a strong enough character to know when it is appropriate to play to your base and when it is better to stay silent – in contrast to Martin McGuinness, who for all his appalling past as an IRA commander, was usually better able to judge such things. Now Gavin Robinson, the DUP leader who is widely seen as a friendly and mild-mannered politician, has directly challenged the notion that Ms O’Neill is in fact a ‘first minister for all’. Mr Robinson is referring to Sinn Fein’s failure of leadership over the way in which the Army had to withdraw from a jobs fair in Londonderry (SF, SDLP and other councillors objected). Ms O’Neill told the BBC that it had been “inappropriate” for the Army to be invited. The SDLP Foyle MP Colum Eastwood pointed out that the trial of Soldier F over the murder of two men on Bloody Sunday is imminent. Mr Robinson is right to describe this as “a failure of leadership” in nationalism and republicanism. It is also profoundly hypocritical on the part of Sinn Fein. Think about their logic: soldiers should be banished from the north west indefinitely due to tragic (and wrong) soldier killings more than half a century ago. Yet when Bloody Friday, the IRA massacre in Belfast, was marked 50 year later in 1972, SF – the party that does not condemn the IRA – was not only present, a memorial to the atrocity was worded as if the bomb had nothing to do with republicans.
