Sam McBride: Martina Anderson’s offensive words reveal a key Sinn Féin vulnerability

But the events of the last 48 hours also hint at changes within Sinn Féin where what appeared to be acceptable to many within Sinn Fein’s northern structures appears to be viewed as a liability for those in the south where the party is on the cusp of real power.

For Ms Anderson as a convicted bomber to attempt to take the moral high ground over those who suffered the horrific life-altering consequences of such actions demonstrated a staggering lack of self-awareness.

But aside from questions of taste or morality, her tweet was so demonstrably offensive – and factually incorrect – that it seriously undermined her party’s campaign against the victims’ pension as currently set out in law.

Claiming that pensions were mostly for “those who fought Britain’s dirty war in Ireland” and “mainly for those involved in collusion” was so inaccurate as to be impossible for even Ms Anderson to defend when challenged.

For many victims of the IRA, this will confirm for them that decades after their suffering began, at least some in Sinn Féin care little for their wellbeing.

It is indicative of the wider feeling on this issue that Brian Turley, a republican who as one of the hooded men was subjected to brutal Army interrogation which the European Court of Human Rights ruled was “inhuman and degrading”, yesterday told Talkback that what Ms Anderson had said was “offensive” and “very immature...just like something a child would do”.

But there are wider political implications. Beyond the small percentage of the population which supported Sinn Féin during the Troubles, the party’s point of acute vulnerability is its connection to IRA atrocities.

The most indisputably innocent victims of those atrocities are those civilians who lost limbs, eyes, movement or life itself when a bomb exploded beside them or a gunman opened fire.

There would seem to be no rational reason for Sinn Féin to oppose those individuals who survived with awful injuries from being compensated, and indeed the party does not appear to have done so.

Rather, Sinn Féin has fought to extend such compensation to those injured as a result of their own actions, such as a bomber whose bomb explodes prematurely, injuring himself.

The number of those individuals is believed to be relatively low and not only is Sinn Féin the richest political party in Ireland but the IRA amassed a vast fortune, of which the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery was only one element, meaning that the provisional republican movement has the cash to compensate those of its members which it believes deserve funding.

Therefore, this has never been about whether there is money to ensure that those ex-IRA members who Sinn Féin believes deserve a victims’ pension receive it, but about the principle of where that money comes from.

Thus far, Sinn Féin’s fierce opposition to the pension as currently formulated has failed politically, with it unable to convince MPs to legislate for the widely-defined pension it wants. Although in recent days Sinn Fein members have expressed opposition to Westminster having legislated for the pension, the party has no principled argument on that front because at the same time as the pension was going through the Houses of Parliament Sinn Féin was welcoming Westminster legislating to legalise abortion in Northern Ireland.

After that political failure, last week saw a spectacular legal failure as Sinn Féin’s rearguard attempt to delay and perhaps halt the pension until its eligibility criteria were rewritten was ruled unlawful by the High Court and Michelle O’Neill immediately backed down, stating that she would move ahead with implementing the pension.

In that context, Ms Anderson’s words were disastrously ill-judged, drawing attention to the fact that Sinn Féin is losing this battle and making it more difficult for it to reverse that situation.

But it points to a far bigger vulnerability for the party – how it frequently allows extreme messages or actions to curtail the party’s growth and its pursuit of Irish unity.

Repeatedly – and from the top down, as demonstrated at Bobby Storey’s funeral – Sinn Féin allows niche secondary issues, often connected to its veneration of the IRA, to undermine its central ideological objective: Persuading more than 50% of people in Northern Ireland to vote for Irish unity.

If Sinn Féin genuinely believed that a vote for a united Ireland was within its grasp within a few years, would it allow senior members to undermine that goal?

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Alistair Bushe