Editorial: Sinn Fein’s evasion of duty in this time of crisis by failing to attend Iran security briefing is contemptible

We hear incessant demands for political reform of the Stormont institutions.

​This is code for the abolition of minority protections now that unionists are in the minority – it really did not take long for many of those who cite the Belfast Agreement as holy writ to demand its overhaul once it suited nationalists and anti-unionists.

If we lived in a remotely normal political situation and had UK governments that defend their nation and those groups within it who are battling against separatists who want to shatter the kingdom, then Conservative governments – let alone Reform UK ones – would be thinking in different reforms.

They would be wondering how the system can be refined to curb some of the wilder excesses of a party – Sinn Fein – that is obsessed with getting Northern Ireland out of the UK, and with making its current status within the nation to seem like a failed entity. At the weekend we had the latest contemptible spectacle in which the first minister of Northern Ireland did not even attend a UK security briefing on Iran. Note that the first minister of Wales, which has a powerful separatist movement, and the first minister of Scotland, who is a Scottish nationalist, attended, along with Emma Little-Pengelly, the deputy first minister of NI.

Michelle O’Neill didn’t. She then took the high ground by saying she was mainly concerned about evacuating Irish and British citizens. What misleading nonsense. Of course the protection of people from here is perhaps the biggest practical thing a devolved government should focus on. But the devolved leaders have an obvious duty to take up confidential briefings from the highest levels of the UK government as to what is going on in this crisis.

That Ms O’Neill “profoundly disagrees” with the war is irrelevant. No-one was asking her to prosecute it.