Rev Hamilton is right that it is wrong for church leaders to engage with Sinn Fein at this time if they aren’t going to challenge them

The letter from the Rev Norman Hamilton opposite is a sad landmark in the recent history of Northern Ireland politics.
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

(The letter is in our print edition and will be put online, with link below, later on Saturday)

No-one could doubt that the former Presbyterian moderator has, like so many churchmen from all the denominations, spent a working life trying to foster reconciliation in the Province.

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Rightly, he has met with Sinn Fein in the past. It has been the largest political party within nationalism for more than a decade. And even if it merely had the support of a large minority of that community, you would expect men and women of the cloth to be pioneering links with a movement that formerly was inextricably linked to violence whenever that movement put violence behind it.

Sinn Fein, like all political organisations, has people of differing approaches within it, even though it is often hard to discern that. With hindsight, for example, Martin McGuinness, for all his terrorist past, was not as destabilising a figure as other republicans. He did not seek to goad and antagonise unionists.

Given the way Sinn Fein has behaved latterly, from toppling Stormont to increasingly shrill celebrations of terrorism to its flagrant role in the mass social distancing breach at the funeral of the IRA man Bobby Storey, it is all the more frustrating to see Mary Lou McDonald — who was prominent that day — present herself as a new type of leader.

No unionist is unaware of republicanism’s essence. Yet almost never does a Protestant churchman speak out, not even when legacy sanitises the IRA and turns against state forces who defended the community from them.

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Dr Hamilton’s comments are sad, but essential. Niceness in the face of disgraceful behaviour is not working.

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