Gerry Kelly’s appearance on the BBC documentary about the Maze Prison breakout seems to have struck an emotive and negative chord with many in the unionist community, given the reaction flowing into the News Letter this morning.
Accusations are also flying around that the BBC glorified the IRA and turned the prison escape into some type of Steve McQueen-style, romanticised adventure.
But looking at it from a purely political perspective, you have to wonder what the Sinn Fein propoganda machine was thinking of?
At a time when it is desperately trying to convince unionists to devolve policing and justice, its policing and justice spokesman is on primetime tv, eulogising his terrorist past and an event in which a prison officer was murdered.
The timing, in terms of the current political impasse, could not have been worse.
If the outrage being expressed here, is replicated in DUP constituency offices up and down the land, it genuinely will give DUP leader Peter Robinson even less room to move than he had before.
And the crowning irony?
Junior Ministers Kelly and Donaldson are now in New York to accept a Peace Dove award!
The often vaunted choreography of the peace process seems to be badly awry.
No regret, no remorse, no shame, no sadness show for the victims, including one which died!!
This rather sums up SF/IRA.
They have not changed one bit. They continue to support and celebrate their past events of murder and mayhem.
How on earth can anyone in their right mind want these thugs having any say whatsoever in the policing and justice of the land!
The DUP really must stick by their pledge to not devolve policing and justice for a political lifetime, if not 2 or 3 political lifetimes as they have previously been quoted saying
By: Gary, Lisburn on September 24, 2008
at 11:58 am