The News Letter reports that Sinn Féin have been forced to change the venue for a commemoration in Enniskillen of Provisional IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, after their original choice [reportedly] checked the conditions of their EU funding.
Their original choice being the Clinton Centre, which was built on the site of a Provisional IRA bomb attack on Remembrance Day 1987 in which 11 people were killed and 63 injured – a twelfth victim died after 13 years in a coma.
From the News Letter report
A spokesman for the Clinton Centre said yesterday the event would have breached funding conditions.
“We have taken advice in relation to the funding conditions and as a result are not in a position to host activity by any political party,” he said.
“We have communicated this to Sinn Fein and as a result they have rearranged the venue for their public talk this weekend.”
Yesterday, Sinn Fein assembly candidate Sean Lynch also confirmed the venue had been changed.
“Due to constraints on the nature of the funding the Clinton Centre receives from Europe, they have informed us that they are unable to host events organised by political parties,” he said.
“We have therefore relocated this event to another venue and look forward to numerous events across Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Ireland and across the globe, which will be held to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike.”
Just as well they didn’t organise that event at the, similarly funded, Ti Chulainn Culture Centre in Mullaghbawn then…
But perhaps these are the kind of things Cardinal Séan Brady had in mind when he spoke at Police Constable Ronan Kerr’s funeral today
[Cardinal] Brady said people “should not glamorise the dreadful pain and sorrow of the past“. “Parents and grandparents, I beg you: plead with your children and with your grandchildren not to get involved with violence. [added emphasis]
“Never let them be deceived by those who say that Ireland will be united or the union made more secure by war.
“They are wrong. It is an illusion. Violence has nothing, absolutely nothing, to offer except misery and destruction.”
Mixed messages, much?
