Mac Cionnaith said, “The decision by Sinn Féin to meet with the British queen is not in the least unsurprising, unanticipated or unexpected. However, that decision needs to be examined in a broader context.
“The Sinn Féin leadership previously took the strategic decision to gradually and consciously move that party away from its former role as a vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle in Ireland. That leadership has also proven itself, in recent times, to be a willing ally of modern neo-con imperialists by assisting the undermining and subversion of anti-imperialist liberation struggles in other countries.
“One calculated outworking of that strategic decision in domestic terms has been the unprecedented acceptance and copper-fastening of partition by that party, and its consent to continuing British government control over part of Ireland, to such an extent that the party is now a willing and integral participant in operating the mechanics of partition and injustice.
“Paying lip-service to demands by families of British state violence for justice and truth while simultaneously acting as a prop for maintaining British injustice has now become one of the hall-marks of the Sinn Féin party.
“The reality of the unchanged nature of British control and the inefficacy of the Sinn Féin approach was highlighted on Monday (June 18th) when incontrovertible proof in the form of official British government documents revealed how, in July 1972, the state at the highest levels officially sanctioned the use of deadly force by its troops against Irish citizens and ensured that members of the Crown forces would receive indemnity from prosecution.
“Further evidence that the 1972 policy is not a mere “legacy issue” but an ongoing and central part of current British policy was demonstrated by the revelation on Wednesday (June 20th) that the British government had rejected a request by the families of the victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre for a public inquiry into those state murders.
“Sinn Féin has also moved away from its working class base and from any semblance of even a thin veneer of socialist politics to a position where it can freely and frequently advocate and ally itself with the interests of the domestic and international business and financial communities.
“It has consistently proved to be a willing tool in the imposition of private finance initiatives and the implementation of the British government’s austerity measures which penalise the young, the old, the sick, the unemployed and those workers on low wages. At the same time, that party has the audacity to hypocritically criticise other parties in the 26 Counties for implementing exactly the same policies at the behest of the Troika.
“In many respects, Sinn Féin today is mirroring and replicating the gradual and total abandonment of core Irish republican ideals in very much the same manner as was practiced by Fianna Fáil in its early history.
“Given that Sinn Féin has decided to target Fianna Fáil’s electoral constituency in the Twenty-Six Counties, it should be no surprise for anyone to learn that Sinn Féin’s current primary objective is to re-create and re-brand itself as some sort of 21st century version of Fianna Fáil with all that particular and discredited political direction entails.
“Meeting with and recognising Elizabeth Windsor as head of the British state in Ireland is but another step along the disreputable path of reformism and one more premeditated and calculated step further away from the revolutionary goal of establishing a free, sovereign and socialist Republic in Ireland.
“But then nothing else could ever be expected from a party which, when correctly politically analysed, amounted only to a modern form of old Catholic ‘defenderism’ and militant nationalist hibernianism.”
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