While addressing a hunger strike commemoration in Ballina this past weekend Sinn Féin Vice President and ‘First Minister’ Michelle O’Neill, remarked that “Sinn Féin is not walking away” when referring to upholding the Stormont colonial administration.
For more than twenty-five years this administration has struggled to keep its head above water, and has failed to deliver anything for those living in the Six County State. Nearly one in three children are living in poverty and there are over 90,000 people on the housing waiting list. There have been more deaths through suicide since the Good Friday Agreement was signed than there were people killed as a result of the ‘conflict’. The Six County State remains one of the most militarised in all of Europe, with Republicans subject to daily stop and searches by the PSNI, aided and abetted by their MI5 masters.
The unconditional, almost fanatical attachment by some in Sinn Féin to the Stormont project would be bad enough based purely on the facts that show its failure. That they used the platform of a hunger strike commemoration to make these remarks is all the more egregious. Sadly, it no longer comes as any surprise.
We cannot speak for dead men, but we must be very sceptical at the idea that they died so that so-called Republican leaders could exploit their deaths in a bid to passionately uphold a colonial government, or to stand behind the same forces which imprisoned them in the first place.
There will be no ‘shared’ or ‘agreed’ Ireland. Stormont must be destroyed, and partition ended. Only a Socialist Republic in Ireland will bring about the changes that will see our people free once and for all – economically as well as politically.
