Gerry Adams should explain somersault

When Sam McBride writes (January 10) that amongst other matters the policies of DUP are 'far more unionist than Sinn Fein', he could have questioned the inclusiveness of DUP unionism - given the nature of the letters that some of its supporters contribute to the News Letter - and he could have added with respect to Sinn Fein, a unionism also 'in an opposite direction'.

Gerry Adams in now returning to claw back something of his earlier role in Northern Ireland politics (and using the current issue on the why and how of the spending of public money to do so) is returning, not as he once was, as the leader of Sinn Fein, a separatist republican party, advocating a separatist, socialist, republican Ireland; and to the achievement of that end wrecking commercial life in Northern Ireland and using the gun to bring to a close the lives of others, many of them so young.

He is instead now heading a party that has somersaulted into a unionist party – brushing under the carpet all earlier talk about a separatist republic – in embracing an integration that was once opposed, that of the Common Market, now the European Union with its wine coloured passport having replaced the green.

That somersault in thought and commitment is what Gerry Adams has to explain to the electorate.

W A Miller, Belfast BT13