Ruth Dudley Edwards tells TUV conference that ‘cancer of Sinn Féin’ is a threat

In a hard-hitting speech entitled “Sinn Féin, the cancer on the island of Ireland”, the historian and author said that the party was a “dreadful outfit” but was “utterly, absolutely superb” at telling its story.

However, while Ms Dudley Edwards said that she “loathed them all”, she felt that Martin McGuinness “wasn’t solely destructive” and was “beginning to like the exercise of power”. She said that “he wasn’t totally malevolent”, unlike some other Sinn Féin politicians.

She said: “The DUP bears a lot of responsibility for the St Andrew’s Agreement, for an agreement around that time which actually at last gave the Shinners was ‘no hierarchy of victims’; the bomber was now as much a victim as the person he murdered. That was one of the things that came out of that – and the destruction of the middle ground, because it suited the DUP at the time.”

She said that St Andrew’s had been “a catastrophe” for small parties.

Ms Dudley Edwards said that Sinn Féin now existed for “the destabilisation of Northern Ireland, obviously, and they’re still telling a good story and they now have these armies of lawyers, they’ve got the whole legacy system skewed against the security forces...you can’t write a thing without IRA-sympathising lawyers out there looking for anything you’ve written; you might be accused of libelling somebody.

“I’m talking about armies – I really mean an army of lawyers; they’ve got a stranglehold on all this. They’re using legal aid to persecute the British Government. It’s ingenious, I have to say.”

She said most politicians “tell the odd fib” or they exaggerate, “but most of them don’t set out to lie shamelessly”.

l Morning View, page 18