SF criticised over IRA advertising

Sinn Féin is advertising T-shirts and lapel badges glorifying IRA violence on its relaunched website.

Sinn Féin is advertising T-shirts and lapel badges glorifying IRA violence on its relaunched website.

T-shirts printed with the logos "Sniper At Work" and "IRA Undefeated Army" are selling in the party's online store for €15.

The IRA was responsible for nearly 1,800 deaths during the Troubles in the North, including those of more than 600 civilians.

The newly revamped Sinn Féin website was launched yesterday amid strong political criticism of the merchandise.

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The Sniper at Work T-shirts, feature a gunman silhouetted inside a red triangle similar to a road sign.

The image is based on home-made signs that appeared in the IRA stronghold of South Armagh.

Mr David McNarry, of the Ulster Unionist Party, called for the removal of the Sinn Féin website from the web yesterday. "Victims of IRA terrorism will recoil in horror that such T-shirts even exist and the fact that a so-called political party can fill its coffers on the basis of such imagery is a further degrading slap in the face," said Mr McNarry.

He said the T-shirts were "disgusting, provocative and ill-befitting of a so-called political party" and said he had lodged a formal complaint with the PSNI Chief Constable.

The SDLP former Assembly member Mr Eugene McMenamin said it was "depressing to Sinn Féin using their official party website to sell merchandise glorifying some of the worst atrocities over the past 30
years".

Sinn Féin president Mr Gerry Adams, who has constantly insisted his party cannot speak for the IRA, dismissed the complaints as "silly season nonsense".

He said: "I want to thank both the SDLP and the unionists for publicising the website."

A Sinn Féin spokesman said the T-shirts had been on sale for years. "Nobody is forcing either the UUP or the SDLP to buy in the online shop," he added. He added: "The reality is that there is a link on the website. It is a link into a bookshop which sells t-shirts.

"If anyone is suggesting for one moment that Sinn Féin's role in the peace process, our commitment to the peace process, our involvement in the peace process and the future of the peace process is in question, because a shop sells t-shirts with the word IRA on it, then they just want to get real."

Democratic Unionist Party councillor Mr Alex Easton said: "To sell T-shirts and baseball caps praising the evil actions of the IRA should demonstrate to anyone with the slightest modicum of intelligence that Sinn Féin and the IRA are indivisible, one and the same, inextricably linked."

"There are many thousands of people up and down Northern Ireland and beyond whose lives and families have been shattered because of the actions of terrorists over the course of last 35 years.

"These innocent victims, who suffer in silence, now have to witness the unedifying spectacle of Sinn Fein glorifying in this evil, making profit from it and heroes out of the men and women who carried it out," he said.

The site also offers an IRA lapel badge and a badge which features the phrase "Tiocfaidh ar Lá" in the shape of a machine gun for just over €5. The site also offers bronze statues of Padraig Pearse, Michael Collins and hunger striker Bobby Sands.