Just drop this here for the Shinnerbots.
Sinn Féin has deleted thousands of media statements that go back nearly two decades from its website in recent days, the Sunday Independent can reveal.
The purging of thousands of comments by party representatives, including leader Mary Lou McDonald and her predecessor Gerry Adams from its official website, comes amid controversy over Sinn Féin’s previous positions on Russia and its calls for the abolition of Nato.
According to the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the world wide web, as recently as last December Sinn Féin had 2,729 pages of statements in the newsroom section of its website, the oldest being Mr Adams committing the party to the peace process in December 2002.
However, the newsroom section of the website, as of last Friday, has only 373 pages with the oldest statement being the Sinn Féin alternative budget announced by Pearse Doherty in October 2019. Statements from 2014 and 2018 that this newspaper accessed on the website within the last fortnight are no longer available and now return a ‘404 Page Not Found’ message.
This suggests that thousands of statements have now been systematically removed from the website by the party within the last two weeks. Sinn Féin did not respond to queries as to why this happened. Other political parties have online archives of press statements stretching back several years.
The deleted Sinn Féin statements can still be accessed through cached versions that can be searched on Google and through the Wayback Machine, but their removal from the main party website makes it harder for users to access them.
One statement that is no longer available on the website is comments from party leader Mary Lou McDonald in March 2018 describing then taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s decision to expel a Russian diplomat over the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, as “a flagrant disregard for Irish neutrality”.
In the statement on March 27, 2018, Ms McDonald demanded the evidence underpinning the decision. “In this case, a decision has been based on information from a foreign security intelligence service, which is an unprecedented step. Essentially, we are being asked to trust Boris Johnson. Dare I say that this might not be the best course of action?” she said.
Sinn Féin has deleted thousands of media statements that go back nearly two decades from its website in recent days, the Sunday Independent can reveal.
www.independent.ie
