Sinn Fein breaks the lockdown rules

The power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland is in trouble again. The problem is a breach of lockdown guidelines so flagrant that it makes Dominic Cummings’s jaunt to the north-east look like a surreptitious sally to the bins.

The entire leadership of Sinn Fein, including the executive’s deputy first minister, Michelle O’Neill, and its finance minister, Conor Murphy, attended the funeral of “senior republican” Bobby Storey, on Wednesday morning.

The new breed of Shinner politician and the media use the term “senior republican” as a coy  euphemism for IRA henchman, but, in this case there wasn’t much chance of hiding Mr Storey’s thuggish past. Nicknamed “the brain surgeon”, he spent twenty years in prison for various terrorist offences.

In 1983, he orchestrated an infamous prison escape from the Maze prison, during which a prison officer was shot in the head. Reputedly, he was also responsible for the raid on Belfast’s Northern Bank headquarters in 2004, when the IRA stole over £26 million, long after it was supposed to be on ceasefire.

Storey was believed to be the terror organisation’s “director of intelligence”, a feared enforcer, who imposed the diktats of its leadership. Sinn Fein portray him as a peacemaker, because he intimidated other thugs into adhering to the IRA’s later tactics of concentrating mainly on politics rather than violence. As recently as 2015, he was arrested in connection with the murder of a former colleague, Kevin McGuigan, during a republican feud.

To attend an event that glorified the life of such a man would, in any normal society, be considered a scandal in itself. In Northern Ireland, in 2020, the rising anger is due to the fact that O’Neill, who alongside Arlene Foster delivered daily lectures on the importance of Covid-19 regulations, flagrantly ignored her own advice.

On the 29th of June, the executive announced a relaxation of lockdown regulations that allows 30 people to meet outdoors, or attend a funeral. The following morning, 1,800 men and women dressed in black trousers, white shirts and black ties lined the route taken by Storey’s funeral cortege. Many thousands more stood behind this sinister guard of honour.

O’Neill, alongside Gerry Adams and the current Sinn Fein president, Mary-Lou McDonald, followed the coffin with hundreds of others. The Catholic church where the funeral ceremony took place refused to confirm how many mourners attended the service, but the BBC reports that it was around 180.

So far, O’Neill has refused to apologise. She claims she was social-distancing, even though she acknowledges that it was wrong to pose for selfies.

All the other political parties in Northern Ireland’s executive have now called for the deputy first minister to stand aside. The Green Party and the TUV, which don’t have seats in the power-sharing government, have added their voices to this growing chorus. Indeed, aside from Sinn Fein, which says that O’Neill will not stand aside “under any circumstances”, the only party not demanding her suspension is People Before Profit, a far left group, whose only MLA, Gerry Carroll, holds a seat in the republican heartlands of West Belfast.

The first minister, Arlene Foster, initially avoided calling for O’Neill to go. There are parallels with the situation in 2017, when Sinn Fein collapsed the executive, ostensibly because Foster would not stand aside to allow an investigation into the RHI clean energy scandal. However, so far, the DUP has said that it will not bring down power-sharing because of O’Neill’s actions.

Yesterday, the executive’s daily coronavirus briefing was called off, because Mrs Foster was not prepared to stand beside O’Neill to dispense the kind of advice which the deputy first minister had so blatantly ignored just days before. It’s not clear if or when this ritual will resume again.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, many people in Northern Ireland, in common with others in the rest of the country, have been unable to attend the burials of loved ones, or have been unable to hold the ceremony that they would have liked. The Storey episode is just the most prominent in a series of republican funerals that have gone ahead without adhering to the rules or social distancing.

In another twist, this morning, the Belfast Telegraph reports that the terrorist godfather was not even buried in Milltown cemetery, where his body was taken and where Gerry Adams delivered an oration, following the procession on Tuesday morning. Instead, he was brought to Roselawn cemetery that afternoon, where Mr Storey was cremated, monitored by sixty Sinn Fein “stewards” who “took control of the cemetery from the entrance gates which are normally manned by council staff.”

It was an extraordinary denouement to an episode that shows that, in Northern Ireland, a terrorist movement that murdered thousands feels it can do what it likes, without any consequences. Sadly, it may well be right.