Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin is on record as saying it will not be part of the institutions if their function is to implement mass social spending cuts that the Tories in London are dreaming up. We would argue that the Tories have no political mandate in the North.

In recent weeks, we have also seen the British Government attempt to breach the Stormont House Agreement on legacy and victims issues. Last week, a group met with the Good Friday implementation committee on this. The Stormont House Agreement clearly sets out a need to provide justice and truth recovery mechanisms for the families of the victims of the conflict. This needs the Irish and British Governments to pass legislation. The draft legislation put forward by the British Government on dealing with the legacy of the past would allow it to regulate the handover of what it terms “sensitive information” to historical inquiries, however.

We believe this is a clear breach of the Stormont House Agreement. It is a blatant piece of stroke politics designed to hide the British State’s role as an active and central participant in the conflict, in particular its collusion with loyalist death squads, including those who planted the Dublin-Monaghan bombs. Elements of the British security establishment, with a political oversight that ended up in Downing Street, armed, trained, supplied intelligence, directed and controlled many of these death squads. Considering the British Government is failing to meet its legal responsibilities on dealing with the past, will the Minister urgently raise this issue with the British Government and tackle this latest attempt to narrow the options for truth recovery for families, victims and their representatives?

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