Is Michelle O’Neill fit to be First or Joint First Minister of “The North” / Northern Ireland?

I can’t think of a European State at the moment where the ruling political movement – or joint ruling political movement – has:

  • kidnapped its own citizens
  • tortured its own citizens
  • extra-judicially executed its own citizens
  • dumped its own citizens’ corpses in full view on the streets or on the border
  • disappeared the corpses of its own citizens
  • cannot or will not help to find the disappeared corpses of its own citizens
  • bombed its own city centres killing its own citizens, men, women, CHILDREN…
  • celebrated all that violence claiming there was ‘no alternative’ to murders and bombings
  • heroized all the terrorists who committed all of the acts of terrorism
  • worked with Colombia’s largest cocaine-trafficking cartel, FARC
  • according to the Irish Department of Justice, has a half-a-billion Euro ‘proceeds of crime’ kitty
  • is itself ruled by an unelected self-styled paramilitary “Army Council” of the IRA
  • is declared by political parties in the Republic of Ireland to be Unfit to Govern
  • childishly refuses to utter the name of its own state

Let me be clear – if that Political Movement had definitively disassociated itself from its violent past – had conclusively distanced itself from its terrorists who had committed its very many Human Rights’ atrocities – if it was teaching young people that its past violence had absolutely no justification – if it had in any manner REPENTED its horrible terrorist past – let me be clear – I could then in some generous conscience offer it a vote…

But neither Sinn Féin nor Michelle O’Neill has rejected the IRA’s terrorist past.

In light of this moral argument, Michelle O’Neill is NOT fit to govern or jointly govern.

In any other European democratic state, the rise of a terrorist-glorifying person to High Office would represent a scandal, an outrage, a serious damage to the quality of democracy in that country – to democracy across Europe.

The fact that the Irish and British governments have given secret amnesties to that unrepentant terrorist movement – thereby laundering its horrible record of Human Rights’ atrocities – as a reward for disbanding its terrorist “army” and entering into constitutional politics – does not lessen the damage to the quality of democracy on the island of Ireland.

Citizenship has been shown to be unequal – the citizens kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Sinn Féin IRA movement have been declared to be second-class citizens unworthy of having their murders investigated and tried and punished before the courts of the land.

Victims of terrorism have been entirely erased.

Citizens who engaged in kidnapping, torture, murders, bombings – members of Sinn Féin IRA – have been declared to be above investigation for kidnapping, torture, murders and bombings – cannot and will not be subject to the normal judicial processes – in secret amnesties.

How this undemocratic outcome may be celebrated – even tolerated – by ‘right thinking people’ is the bloodiest stain on democracy that no amount of laundering will disappear.

Christianity Dumped

The popularity of Sinn Féin highlights how both in the Nationalist community as in the Unionist community the old Christian/Catholic/Protestant notions of “sin” and “repentance” have disintegrated.

Sinn Féin IRA has decisively and permanently rejected any and all notion of both Sin and Repentance.

Kidnapping, torturing, extra-judicially executing, bombing, maiming, disappearing, robbing, extorting, lying – these were never sins… none of these was ever subject to repentance… nor are they now.

For all the newer Protestant and Catholic churchmen fawning around the IRA’s leaders – the core of the Christian message has been obliterated by the Sinn Féin IRA movement…

Archbishop Eamon Martin posing with unrepentant ArchIRA Martin McGuinness

What is the basis of this new society’s morality then?

Pragmatism?

The overarching fear of the return of the gun and bomb?

Brian Feeney:

In 2005, the Department of Justice estimated the IRA’s global assets at €400 million.

Since then it has been privatised, with individual IRA members holding property portfolios and businesses in Ireland, Britain, Europe and the US in trust. Who controls it all? How?

For some reason, both governments and unionists seem obsessed that individual IRA men killing a former IRA man is a terminal threat to political stability in the North, yet ignore the implications of the IRA’s clandestine financial empire.

Ten years ago, Michael McDowell also said that demanding the IRA disband was pointless without demanding its war chest be emptied. Apparently that was a needless complication.

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