With Vladimir Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine, a central plank of Sinn Féin’s foreign policy has gone up in smoke. A party that has long equivocated over Putin’s brutal regime has felt compelled to ditch its previous positions and embrace new ones. \
This has not been accompanied by any evident self-reflection within the party about why it could be so wrong about something so important for so long. On the contrary, the party simply wiped thousands of embarrassing statements from its website.
The material was “out of date”, it said.
Among the pronouncements Sinn Féin presumably wishes to forget are then-MEP Lynn Boylan’s suggestion in 2019 that the EU was being “overly confrontational” towards
Russia. Four years earlier, Boylan joined the party’s other MEPs in abstaining on an “unbalanced” resolution condemning rights abuses in Russia and criticising Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
In 2018, party leader Mary Lou McDonald claimed
Ireland had breached its military neutrality when it expelled a Russian diplomat after Russia’s deployment of a chemical weapon in
England. Former foreign affairs spokesman Seán Crowe called for the abolition of
Nato, a “Cold War relic” whose positions “have always been wrong”.
news.sky.com
www.belfastlive.co.uk
.
www.breakingnews.ie
sluggerotoole.com
