Letter: Ireland rugby fans singing Zombie is a fight back against Sinn Fein/IRA and their apologists

I stopped watching rugby not so long ago when Sinn Fein/IRA attempted to hijack any victory the team had and used it as propaganda against Northern Ireland. It was only last week when Ireland won their match against Tonga and Zombies was sung that I realised that something was happening. And happen it did.

On Saturday Ireland beat South Africa 13-8 and at the end of the match 80,000 people started singing Zombies. Republican social media has gone into meltdown.

All of a sudden people like Tadhg Hickey who presents himself as a comedian actor and wishes to “break up the United Kingdom through the unusual means of comedy” and has a long list of high profiled followers stated the following:

‘Zombie is the perfect partitionist anthem. It encapsulates the complete lack of understanding or even basic compassion in the South for the lived experience of Northern nationalists.

‘"But you see, it's not me

It's not my family"

‘State sponsored murder, pogroms, second class citizenship, complete abdication of responsibility from the South – that's all "in your head"’

Quickly, others jumped on his bandwagon and IRA sympathisers were crawling out from bottomless pits to lambast the song and anyone who dared to sing or play it repeating the fabricated story that the song was written as a ‘partionist anthem’.

So for those who perhaps don't know the song Zombies by the Cranberries was written in response to the Warrington Bombing carried out by the IRA in which two children, twelve-year-old Tim Parry and three-year-old Johnathan Ball were brutally murdered.

As has been pointed out to Tadhg Hickey the attempt to justify the cold-blooded murder of two young children who were shopping for Mother's Day cards as if was akin to the lived experience of northern nationalists, needs to check their level of morals and compassion.

Perhaps I am being naive however, to me the playing of this song by Ireland rugby fans is a fight back at Sinn Fein/IRA and their apologists, whilst they sing songs glorifying the murderous deeds of the IRA through songs by the Wolfe Tones and Kneecap, the decent, moral citizens on the island of Ireland who are witnessing the revision and white-washing of history by the IRA are saying in a subtle yet effective way that they're done and they've had enough, the justification of the IRA and their murder campaign is not in their name, and it’s not in the name of their families.

That the reasons for justifying a campaign of murder by IRA terrorists are indeed in the heads of those who attempt it.

I hope that the song shoots to number one on the charts, why?

Because what better way to remind those who like to turn a blind eye to what the IRA did (and still do), that those of us with morals have not, and will not go away.

The truth will always win.

Lorna Smyth, Newtownards