Sinn Fein trio had to quit over tardy return of wrongly paid precious Covid-19 funds

First there is the speed with which the episode has flared up, and in which a typically cocky Sinn Fein has found itself suddenly on the back foot.

Then there is the sudden return of the money, shortly before the BBC’s Nolan Show exposed the payments (a programme that has done excellent journalism in recent months).

Also there is the swift way that the republican party responded to the news of grants being wrongly paid into accounts connected with it.

The latter speed is welcome, and seems driven by SF president Mary Lou McDonald, who said sorry for the saga.

Our news reports on pages 6 and 7 recap on how the payments came about and why they were wrong.

Ms McDonald struck the right tone when she said that the mis-direction of funds came a time of “struggling businesses in times of extraordinary hardship”.

But while many people might think that tardiness in returning a grant for which you never applied while clearly wrong is not the very worst sin, it is Sinn Fein’s approach to politics that precludes the party from any such instinctive sympathy.

Even aside from its grave misdeeds in recent years (from collapsing Stormont until it got an Irish language act, to leading members triumphantly celebrating the worst IRA killers), the party has been specifically self righteous on Covid.

It called for the toughest lockdown, and was above all obsessed about all island co-ordination (breaking a position on school closures almost as soon as it was agreed in March).

It was one of the last parties to accept cemetery re-openings, yet was silent about flagrant republican funeral breaches, before appearing at the helm of the biggest IRA funeral breach of all (at the Bobby Storey commemorations).

Even after that outrage, the party had the nerve to be scathing about what it said was UK recklessness with people’s health.

And always lavish funding from London was not enough.

Now some of that precious crisis money has been found to have been languishing in SF linked accounts.

That background is all the more reason why the three Sinn Fein politicians had to go.

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