Sinn Féin has signed up to an agreement that secures partition and is a worse deal for nationalism than the 1973 Sunningdale agreement, it was claimed today.
In a pre-emptive strike before the launch of Sinn Féin's election manifesto in West Belfast, the Ulster Unionist Party produced its own document containing 10 things Republicans would not be told by Gerry Adams today.
The "Not the Sinn Féin Manifesto" document also disputed Sinn Féin claims that north-south bodies set up by the Belfast Agreement contain a dynamic for a united Ireland.
The UUP document argued:
- Sinn Féin was collaborating in the partition of Ireland by signing up to the principle of consent that was at the heart of the Belfast Agreement and as the majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted the union with Britain, so it would remain.
- North-south bodies accounted for only 0.2 per cent of government expenditure in the North and were under the direct control of a majority Unionist Stormont Assembly and therefore would not inevitably lead to a united Ireland.
- Republicans had also failed to extract a declaration of intent from the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland and were in fact endorsing a deal which was worse than the power sharing arrangements agreed in 1973 at Sunningdale - an accord Republicans rejected.
- Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brun were ministers of the British Crown and were working out of the old seat of Unionist power under Union flags.
- Sinn Féin was now co-operating with the European Union whereas in the past it was opposed to the concept which they branded as capitalist.
- Sinn Féin was prepared to take evidence from Royal Ulster Constabulary officers on committees at Stormont despite stating its opposition to the police force.
- It was firm friends with American right-wingers such as leading US Republican politicians Peter King and Ben Gilman, despite advocating the cause of Marxism and had also agreed a programme for government in the Stormont executive that was hardly Marxist.
- Sinn Féin was not telling its rank and file that the disbandment of the IRA was an inevitable outworking of the party's political strategy.
The document also quoted 1980 hunger striker and former commanding officer of the IRA in the Maze Prison Brendan Hughes asking: "Does 30 years of struggle boil down to a big room at Stormont, ministerial cars, dark suits and the implementation of the British Patten Report [on policing]?"
The mock manifesto has already been used as a tactic by the Ulster Unionists against the Democratic Unionists.
PA