The coffin of ex-IRA commander Martin McGuinness is carried to his home in Londonderry by Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and Raymond McCartney, convicted of the murder of police officer Detective Constable Patrick McNulty in 1977.
Sinn Féin deputy leader Michelle O’Neill has announced that she will attend the coronation of King Charles III in London, despite the Provisional IRA’s murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten off the Sligo coast in 1979, and numerous bombings carried out in London by the terrorist group.
O’Neill, who is due to become first minister of Northern Ireland if power sharing is restored at Stormont, said that while she does not condone the IRA’s actions during the Troubles, she believes there was no alternative to their use of violence.
O’Neill’s father, Brendan Doris, was a prominent member of the IRA and served time in prison for his involvement with the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade in the Seventies. Often referred to as the ‘A Team’, the unit became one of the IRA’s most professional and effective units, killing dozens of British soldiers and Royal Ulster Constabulary officers in a bombing campaign on Army bases and police stations.
‘He was a brilliant man,’ Miss O’Neill has said of her father. ‘He definitely played a big part in shaping who I am today.’
Her father was not the only member of the family to be involved in terrorist activities: her cousin, Tony Doris, was a part of a brigade ‘death squad’ preparing to assassinate a high-ranking member of the security forces in 1991. However, they were ambushed by the SAS on the road between Londonderry and Tyrone.
A second cousin, Gareth, was part of an IRA cell which carried out a bomb attack on a police station at Coalisland, County Tyrone, in 1997. Although shot during the attack, he survived, receiving a ten-year jail sentence. He was released under an amnesty put in place by Tony Blair.
A fondness for dead terrorists.
In 2010, O’Neill became Dungannon’s first female mayor. One of her first acts was to unveil a framed commemorative portrait of another East Tyrone terrorist, Martin McCaughey at a reception in the mayor’s parlour.
McCaughey and a colleague were shot dead by the SAS in 1999, both terrorists were wearing balaclavas and carrying Soviet-supplied Kalashnikov assault rifles at the time.
Irish Republican terrorists were responsible for significantly more deaths during ‘The Troubles’, than Loyalist groups, British Security forces, and Irish security forces combined.
Miss O’Neill, and her family, have been associated with many of the most notorious terrorists to have emerged from the Troubles.
The coronation will be attended by dignitaries from around the world. Many decent people, and especially those bereaved during the troubles, will be asking why an apologist for terrorists should be allowed anywhere near the event.
