The election day poll that showed Sinn Fein had garnered more support than any other party provides the most piercing and unflattering insight into the reality of Irish life. For that figure of 22.1% in the poll – which turned out to be a blessed overstatement when the votes were actually counted – is the same pestiferous minority percentile that has cursed life in the 26 counties since independence, when in 1922 22.1% of the new electorate voted against the Treaty.
Remember that last Friday’s vote came after hundreds of thousands of voters had seen the film Say Nothing about the role of Gerry Adams in the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. The National Council of Women seems never to have denounced this atrocity. I wonder why. Is it because Adams is the creator of the modern Sinn Fein? His fingerprints are all over it, so spare me any stuff about the IRA and “long ago”. After all, if a party were now to be founded by Conor McGregor, it would never escape his curse. And as for the claim that a vote for Sinn Fein is a protest vote at the repeated failure of Dublin governments, all rubbish.
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