Statement by TUV leader Jim Allister:
“Comments by the Sinn Fein leader in Northern Ireland in today’s Belfast Telegraph underscore the reality that the Republican movement has not and will not change. O’Neill puts dead IRA men in the same category as the innocents they went out to slaughter when she says “We all have a right to remember our dead”.
“There will be countless relatives of IRA victims who will find her claim that she “will never fail to stand beside a mother who has lost her child in the conflict” galling. While Republicans demand that every scrap of records relating to the deaths of terrorists at the hands of the state is released they continue to deny any truth or justice to those who lost their lives at the hands of the wicked IRA.
“O’Neill and her party make no secret that their end goal is still the same as that perused by the IRA. They are simply seeking to break the Union by other means. It is time Unionists woke up to that reality. With even Peter Robinson now saying that we need to move away from mandatory coalition and remove from Republicans the power to pull the government down at will it is time Unionists used their influence at Westminster to force the changes to the 1998 Act which are necessary to bring us stable government.”