This Sunday (10th October) Sinn Féin leader in the Six Counties, Michelle O’Neill, will lay a wreath in Belfast for Remembrance Sunday. In response, Lasair Dhearg spokesperson Pádraig Scott has released the following statement.
This Sunday, Michelle O’Neill will stand at the cenotaph outside Belfast’s City Hall and lay a wreath in remembrance of British soldiers who have been killed in conflicts past and present. In doing so, her and her party will once again turn their backs on all of the victims of state murder and repression here in Ireland.
She has said that Republicans will feel uncomfortable, but ‘uncomfortable’ doesn’t begin to describe the anguish that will be felt by the victims of British imperialism here in Ireland when they watch her kneel in honour of those who murdered their family and friends. Were it not just the latest in a decades long shedding of Republican principles it would be quite rightly seen as a betrayal.
O’Neill and the rest of her party have said that because she is now ‘First Minister’ she has a responsibility to represent everyone. Let’s be clear though, there will be no appearance as ‘First Minister’ at commemorations to remember fallen Republican volunteers. Indeed, in recent years, when senior Sinn Féin members have actually engaged with these events, it has been carefully stage managed; sanitised so as to spare the blushes of the party leadership who often seem embarrassed to have to acknowledge their revolutionary past.
Those remembered by the ceremonies on Sunday will include the soldiers who fought on the side of the empire in gunning down and shelling Irish men and women in Dublin on Easter Week 1916. It will include the Crown forces who murdered 14 people in Derry in 1972, those who massacred 8 IRA volunteers in Loughall in 1987, not to mention the cowards in the Glenanne Gang who massacred countless civilians in O’Neill’s home county of Tyrone, and elsewhere.
Sunday will see all of these people and more honoured by Sinn Féin. In previous years they have excused their attendance at Somme commemorations by claiming that only soldiers who were killed in the First World War were being commemorated. They no longer have this excuse.
There is no doubt that those who have followed Sinn Féin’s path will continue to do so. They will continue to tell us that we all need to move on and let the past go. In years to come, however, when we look back on events like those of this coming Sunday, it will not be forgotten which side Sinn Féin chose to stand behind. They cannot claim that they did not know the meaning of their actions, and they will not be forgiven by those of us who continue to stand behind the legacy of those who, for many long years, stood against the might of the British Empire, and chose to stand up rather than kneel down.
They would do well to heed the words of James Connolly – “The British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland.”. There will be no apologies for this position.
