Party gives weight to rewriting of history

People need to be reminded of just how blood-soaked the ladder Sinn Fein climbed to power is. Sadly, in seeking justify their political summersaults the UUP and later the DUP argued that republicans had changed even dropping the full and correct title of the Republican party from their vocabulary - Sinn Fein/IRA.

It didn’t even come back when the UK government produced a report which said the IRA Army Council remains in existence and oversees the mainstream republican movement with an overarching strategy.

Just a few weeks ago Ian Pailsey Jr praised self-confessed IRA commander McGuinness for saving living.

Lest anyone think that such revisionism was isolated or Mr Paisley had gone on a solo run they should remember that no one in his party has spoken out against McGuinness’s nomination for the Tipperary International Peace Award.

Could that be because in 2010 then DUP leader Peter Robinson jointly accepted an award from the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation alongside none other than Martin McGuinness?

In the election campaign the DUP have claimed that they are the people to stop republicans rewriting history.

But can they really claim to be able to do that when they are saying Martin McGuinness saved lives or have jointly accepted peace awards with McGuinness?

What greater re-writing of history could their be than for the then DUP leader to accept such an award alongside someone he once described as “the Bogside Butcher”?

Samuel Morrison, Lagan Valley TUV Assembly candidate