Michelle O’Neill must resign as deputy first minister, and the other political parties should say so

The procession for Bobby Storey was the single most flagrant breach of social distancing rules since March 23, of which there have been many.

The Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast on June 3 had hitherto been the most flagrant defiance of guidelines, which people in Northern Ireland have observed for three months.

Thousands of bereaved, conscientious, law abiding, responsible people have set aside their grief to miss funerals of loved ones in the interests of the wider health of society.

Yet everyone knew a major IRA funeral would cast aside the rules, as smaller IRA ones did.

We all know that it is one law for republicans and one for the rest of us.

Even if there had been no crisis, it would have been grisly enough to watch leading Sinn Fein figures and huge crowds commemorate an the leader of an IRA terrorist group that is drenched in bloodshed. It would have been a reminder that while low level soldiers now face murder trials, IRA leaders seem somehow to enjoy immunity from the various legal processes that are exhaustively examining the UK state.

It would have been a reminder that always Northern Ireland has to have Sinn Fein in power, regardless of how they behave, or how they want to dismantle this state.

It would have been a reminder that the same Irish politicians who scold and hector and interfere and told unionists to agree to Sinn Fein demands for the return of Stormont won’t have them near power in Dublin.

But to greatly exacerbate these various horrors, it did happen while social distancing rules are still in place, and not only that but the breach implicated the leadership of Sinn Fein, the party that has been the most shrill and sanctimonious about lockdown.

It insisted that it was not motivated by a cynical all-island agenda, as it so plainly seemed to be, but that it was guided by the science.

Michelle O’Neill, always utterly implausible as an expert on such matters, kept talking and lecturing about a deadly pandemic.

Her party delayed relaxations of rules (until the Republic opened up in a particular sphere, when its opposition would vanish).

She once even said that workers should walk out of workplaces they thought unsafe in terms of social distancing. (On May 12 she said in Stormont: ‘I absolutely support any worker walking out of the workplace if it is not safe. That is exactly how it should be’).

This newspaper said that Dominic Cummings should quit for his breach of lockdown. But he was only an advisor. Yesterday was far worse.

It was a calculating, public shattering of the funerals limit of 10 people and gatherings of 30.

And it was a breach from a political leader, at the very helm of this society, who instructed us all almost daily for more than three months on what she in an often bossy tone said we could and could not do.

Yet always there are plenty of people who are not of Sinn Fein, but who seem to do their best to apologise for them. Yesterday they were suggesting maybe it wasn’t a total breach, because the rules around numbers are somehow ambiguous, or that the people at the funeral tried to social distance by at times appearing to stand a little bit apart.

What nonsense, disproved by the huge crowds packed close together along the funeral route, shattering by factors of hundreds limits that are very clear, both the 10 person limit for funerals and the 30 person limit for gatherings, with Michelle O’Neill at the helm of it all. She made a mockery of her own stridency on lockdown since March 23.

It will be completely inappropriate, and a grave insult to the general public, to see her at another press conference in that role setting down the law, alongside Arlene Foster.

Michelle O’Neill must resign, and all the other political parties should find some courage and say so.

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