Ireland has given its own twist to the populist uprisings across Europe, with its election ushering in a grim time for Anglo-Irish relations. The results from Saturday’s poll – in which Sinn Fein took 24.5 per cent of the vote; Fianna Fáil, 22 per cent; and Fine Gael, 21 per cent – could also cause serious complications in the Brexit negotiations.
In so enthusiastically switching its support to Sinn Fein (the party won 13.8 per cent of the vote in 2016), Ireland is endorsing a party that pretends to be democratic, left-wing and progressive but still effectively operates internally along militaristic lines, tolerating no dissent from its elected representatives. As the Irish journalist Eoghan Harris put it yesterday: “Sinn Fein is the only European party with an armed wing – marking us out as a rogue democracy.”
Sinn Fein is a party intent on rewriting the history of the Troubles to represent the IRA’s squalid sectarian campaign preposterously as a struggle for human rights against foreign oppressors, which ultimately became a peace movement.
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