Too Far ? Too Dangerous ?

I’ll dip my toe into overtly political waters once more. The Belfast Telegraph carries a call by Ian Paisley Jnr for Sinn Fein’s assets to be frozen.

It is also reported:

Because the IRA has been blamed for the robbery, Ian Paisley junior said Sinn Fein’s funding should be locked down on both sides of the border, followed by “a thorough forensic examination” of their accounts.

Is this not going too far ? Even if the call for “parliamentary and local government perks halted for all Sinn Fein members, a complete ban on official contact with the party and the Sinn Fein barred from Stormont” was supported by the Governments and the SDLP, would an assets freeze not force Sinn Féin into a corner and engender so much ill-will that we could say goodbye to any hope of progress?

Would such apparent aggression, some might even say repression, against a party that has yet to be implicated in this crime not lead to Sinn Féin regaining a lot of the ground they have lost such as is to be seen in hostile columns papers such as the Guardian, the Sunday Business Post and the Boston Globe?

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