Sinn Féin to oppose EU as military superpower

SINN FÉIN will resist any move to turn the European Union into a military or economic superpower, the European Commission was warned yesterday.

The party’s first Irish MEP, Mary Lou McDonald, invoked the memory of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in her maiden speech to the parliament as she warned that her party would also oppose any attempt to turn the EU into a superstate.

Sands was one of 10 republicans who starved themselves to death in 1981 in a bitter dispute over prison conditions with then-British Prime minister Margaret Thatcher and was elected as Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP during the hunger strike.