Sinn Féin can’t have it both ways

DESPITE the hard-hitting allegations contained in the report of the North’s Independent Monitoring Commission, which squarely lays the blame for a string of recent robberies at the door of the IRA and Sinn Féin, the lack of concrete evidence to support this contention remains the weak link in the argument.

Not only does the report point the finger of blame at Provisional IRA for the £26.5 million (38m) Northern Bank robbery, as well as three other raids, it claims they were carried out with the full sanction of senior members of Sinn Féin. While the individuals are not identified in the document, the commission calls for financial penalties on Sinn Féin.

While the dogs on the street could list the likely candidates, they have yet to be identified as such. It is high-time the commission and the Irish and British Governments named names.

Until such evidence is produced, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams will find it easy to challenge Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to have him arrested or withdraw his accusations that the Sinn Féin leadership had prior knowledge of the bank raid.

Not surprisingly, Sinn Féin rejects the report in its entirety. And they will go on dismissing the document’s credibility until the cows come home because of the glaring lack of evidence.

Politicians and the security forces on both sides of the Border should now grasp the nettle and publish the relevant evidence linking Sinn Féin with ongoing IRA activities.

To date, North Kerry Deputy Martin Ferris is the only politician to have been so named. Unsurprisingly, given that IRA membership is a crime, he has emphatically denied the allegation by Tánaiste Mary Harney who claimed that he was on the army council.

If, as Justice Minister Michael McDowell argues, the Commission reached its conclusions by getting independent evidence to back up its claims, those facts should be laid out.

Besides attributing responsibility in broad brush strokes, the Commission has failed to focus the spotlight on those who sanctioned or carried out the raid.

Many people will share Mr Ahern’s view that Sinn Féin and the IRA are two sides of the same coin. According to Mr McDowell, the leadership of the republican movement calls the shots for the intertwined organisations. He says the top brass of the movement was directly involved in organising criminal activities in the Republic and that the IRA was involved in a major raid at the port of Dublin in 2004.

If, as he puts it, leading members of the IRA regularly appear on television and are household names, then he should not hesitate to put the facts into the public domain.

Unless Sinn Féin is prepared to sever all links with the IRA, it will be irrevocably associated in the public mind with criminal activities.

Criminality and democratic politics cannot go hand in hand. It is time the IRA stood down and abandoned the politics of the bomb and the bullet once and for all.

The problem for Sinn Féin is that its mantra of denial is not believed by a public sick and tired of the criminality of the IRA. Unless the political landscape changes dramatically there will be no political progress in the North.

Sinn Féin cannot have it both ways. There can be no place in the democratic process for politicians who adopt a nod and wink approach towards criminality or who think they can hold the threat of a private army over the Irish people.