SF bemoan decade of 'unfounded attacks'

The vilification of Sinn Féin illustrates the gulf between the political elite and ordinary working people, the party’s annual conference was told tonight.

In the opening address to the conference, European Parliament candidate Mary Lou McDonald said her party was being subjected to “the same unsubstantiated and unfounded attacks” this weekend as they were exactly 10 years ago.

She told delegates: “It is remarkable that exactly 10 years ago this week the same denunciations, the same unsubstantiated and unfounded attack on Sinn Féin that are dominating the headlines this week were taking place then.

“Those attacks, while mainly focused on Sinn Féin, also took in any individual, organisation or any community that dared to have anything to do with Sinn Féin or Irish republicanism.”

She was commenting a week after Northern Ireland Police chief Hugh Orde accused the IRA of being behind the attempted abduction of dissident republican Bobby Tohilll from a Belfast city centre pub.

Mr Orde’s claims sparked a fresh political crisis in Northern Ireland, with Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble threatening to lead his party out of talks to restore the Assembly if the British and Irish governments did not impose sanctions on Sinn Féin by suspending them from the review of the Good Friday Agreement.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern added to the controversy yesterday by claiming he had always assumed when he met Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams that he had been a member of the IRA in the past.

Ms McDonald tonight said Sinn Féin was not only steadily increasing its level of support in the Republic of Ireland but was now running neck-and-neck with Fine Gael and Labour.

She recalled in 1994 the people of Tallaght and Killinarden had stood firm after they were criticised for hosting the Sinn Féin party conference in their area.

“The attacks then highlighted the gulf that exists between the vision of ordinary working men and women and the political elite in this country,” she said.

“In Tallaght, as it was across a number of communities where Sinn Féin held its Ard Fheisenna (party conferences), it was ordinary people who knew what could be possible and were willing to try and achieve what the elite claimed was impossible.

“This, comrades, is the crux of the matter. This is the context in which we should be viewing recent events and this is the context in which we should be looking forward beyond this Ard Fheisenna weekend.

“We are the ordinary people of Tallaght, the ordinary people of Derry, Belfast, Donegal, Dublin, Galway, Wexford, Cork and Kerry and all across this island and we have a vision for the future.

“We reject this status quo. We rejects the lazy, self-serving, self-promoting ego mania politics of Fianna Fail, of the Progressive Democrats, in Fine Gael and of the Labour Party in the south and the DUP, the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP in the north who think they have fooled the people of this island into believing that there is no alternative.”

Voters on both sides of the border, she said, were supporting Sinn Féin because its policies were an alternative to the selfishness that permeated politics in the Republic of Ireland and because the party was challenging the path of acceptance of “so-called constitutional nationalists.”

Sinn Féin’s success in last November’s Assembly elections north of the border, the European Parliament candidate said, wasn’t a fluke.

“It wasn’t an accident,” she insisted.

“It happened despite the best efforts of the British government in disenfranchising over 200,000 voters because the people support our vision of the future.”