Editorial: A first minister of Northern Ireland who commemorates IRA terrorism

​When Michelle O’Neill was styling herself first minister of Northern Ireland, during the suspended Stormont, she said she would be so ‘for all’.

​Stormont returned in February, and the grievance that unionists would not accept a nationalist first minister was shown to be wrong. Unionists would long ago have accepted a nationalist such as the late Seamus Mallon, the former SDLP deputy first minister of NI, who despised terror.

Naturally there was reluctance to see a first minister from Sinn Fein, a party that was inextricably linked to the IRA, with former leading SF members of it having once been active in the paramilitary group, and which has become increasingly bold in its celebration of IRA terrorism.

It is able to be so bold because fewer and fewer people remember the pre 1994 violence. Young people across nationalist Ireland sing ‘Ooh ah up the Ra’ and if someone points this out they are, in effect, told to stop fussing.

The DUP were harangued and hectored when Stormont was kept down over the major constitutional matter of an Irish Sea border, with threats from the UK establishment of an increased role for the Irish government if they did not go back. No such pressure was applied to SF when they kept government down over their sectarian Irish language act (which of course they got).

Despite all of this, the DUP restored Stormont. Many unionists thought that Michelle O’Neill in that role would not commemorate IRA terrorists. Unfortunately, she did so last week for three IRA men who killed themselves in Magherafelt in 1971 as they planted a bomb to kill others.

Apologists for Sinn Fein point out that Ms O’Neill attended a remembrance day service in Belfast. Amid all the gushing over her attendance, we wrote that if she defended past IRA murder of the security forces being commemorated it would be better if she stayed away. All the more so if it is cited to justify hailing the IRA.