Woman bereaved by IRA massacre rounds upon Sinn Fein over 'hypocrisy' after the party condemns war crimes during Israel-Palestine debate
A woman bereaved by one of the IRA's most notorious massacres has said it is hypocritical of the party to loudly condemn Israeli war crimes given the republican movement's past.
Aileen Quinton, whose mother Alberta was one of 12 people killed in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, was reacting to the language of Sinn Fein TDs speaking in the Dail this week.
Following the Irish government's decision on Tuesday to recognise Palestine as a fully-fledged country, the Irish parliament convened to discuss it.
Reference to Israeli "war crimes" were made a dozen times by seven different TDs, five of them Sinn Fein members.
For example Sinn Fein Wicklow TD John Brady said: "We need a commitment that, if the war criminal Netanyahu sets foot in this State, he will be arrested immediately."
Ms Quinton said: "I don't accept the IRA were fighting a war. It was a nasty terrorist campaign they tried to make more noble by making out it was a war."
But she went on to add: "If we accept their terminology – which I don't – then they are guilty of war crimes."
As such, their denunciations of others' war crimes is "hypocrisy".
However, she added: "I wish hypocrisy was the worst Sinn Fein-IRA ever did. My mother was not murdered by hypocrisy."
She lamented how well Sinn Fein leaders' cross-community gestures (such as Michelle O'Neill's visit this year to Windsor Park) often go down, given the party's ongoing refusal to condemn the IRA.
"Everybody says 'oh isn't that positive'!" Mrs Quinton said.
"No: anything they do whilst failing to condemn the terrorists they're associated with is a negative thing.
"That attitude is why they get away with such speeches in the Dail."
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ENNISKILLEN RAISED AT ICC
In accusing Israel of war crimes last week, Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court had cited the example of the Enniskillen bomb specifically.
He had said: “There were [IRA] attempts to kill Margaret Thatcher, Airey Neave was blown up, Lord Mountbatten was blown up, there was the Enniskillen attack, we had kneecappings…
“But the British didn’t decide to say, ‘Well, on the Falls Road there undoubtedly may be some IRA members and republican sympathisers, so therefore let’s drop a 2,000lb bomb on the Falls Road.’ You can’t do that.”
Mrs Quinton's charge of hypocrisy and IRA war crimes was put to Sinn Fein, as was her belief that Sinn Fein and the IRA are subsets of the same movement.
A response is awaited.
During the Troubles the IRA killed in excess of 1,700 people.
Between the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel (killing over 1,000 people) and March this year, the subsequent conflict “conservatively” left over 30,000 people dead in Gaza, according to an article in Time magazine by US professor of epidemiology Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins medical university.