Sinn Féin supporters north and south have made it plain, on air and online, that they believe the 2007 murder of Paul Quinn has only been raised in recent weeks to discredit the party in the Republic’s general election.
While the election has caused the reporting, it is not for the reason alleged.
The Quinn family and the media have constantly raised the case over the past 13 years, most recently last month when Stormont was restored.
What has changed since the election is that Sinn Féin has stopped ignoring these media questions and family appeals, so now there are developments to report.
At least Sinn Féin realises it has a problem to address, if only to appeal to those more upset by a murder than by anyone daring to mention it.
Paul Quinn died five months after the last restoration of Stormont, following the St Andrews agreement. His life was quietly judged then to be less important than devolution, which is what has brought this moral squalor on us all.
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The RHI inquiry will publish its report next month, it has finally been announced, just one month short of three years since its preliminary hearing. Many people are expecting serious consequences at Stormont but they will be sadly mistaken. Everything the report is likely to say has been priced into the system and any head ever likely to roll has been safely rolled out of the way. Every journalist and member of the public interested in following the details has already read Sam McBride’s exhaustive book, Burned, written in a third of the time while the author was holding down a full-time job. The only novel question the report is going to raise is whether protracted public inquiries are a worthwhile exercise in addressing government dysfunction. The convention of allowing people mentioned in inquiry reports to challenge the contents before publication appears to have held up the RHI report by over a year.
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The use of public inquiries to address the Troubles risks being discredited by other means. After the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the government apology that followed, families brought closure with a powerful and dignified final parade. The Bloody Sunday Trust, which represents families, has had to issue a statement reminding everyone it has no connection to the parade now taking place every year, which this year featured an appearance by dissident group Saoradh.
In a similar vein, a reminder is clearly needed that the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, far from pursuing soldiers for prosecution, conferred immunity from prosecution on all testimony it accepted.
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Even by their own logic-defying standards, dissident republicans outdid themselves by plotting a ‘Brexit bomb’ attack in Belfast Harbour on January 31.
What possible republican rationale could there be for blowing up the sea border?
Is it just petulance that a hard border never materialised?
When it was revealed last year the government wants inspection facilities located on the UK mainland this was because those facilities were understood to be a loyalist target. Will both sides end up fighting on the dockside, like in a 1980s action movie?
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A petition has been launched calling on Stormont to refuse a £126 million bailout loan for Ulster University’s Belfast campus, until university provision is expanded in Derry.
Ulster’s squandering in Belfast deserves criticism but this is not the zero-sum game campaigners assume. Stormont gets a special kind of additional funding of around £200 million a year that it must use for loans on projects like university buildings.
The Treasury only expects the borrower to repay 60 per cent but nothing has to be repaid to Stormont, which also gets to keep any interest. The real problem is lending out all the money every year. Stormont routinely hands three-quarters of it back to London unused. This has wasted enough in the past two years alone to finish the Belfast campus and build Derry’s new medical college.
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Sinn Féin pulled out all the stops ahead of raising a council motion to close Belfast Zoo on financial and animal welfare grounds, with front pages supporting the proposal on party-linked newspapers.
The idea of closure was first mooted four years ago, for the same reasons, by UUP councillor Chris McGimpsey. The DUP made a major issue of animal welfare in its general election campaign last December. Yet when it came to the vote Sinn Féin was on its own, with even the Greens dismissing it out of hand.
The elephant in the room is that other parties believe Sinn Féin has another use for the site in mind and has not been entirely forthcoming on the matter.
