Sir, - Sinn Fein, bravely led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, has travelled a difficult road towards democracy. It has taken it quite a number of years since the first Hume-Adams talks to get this far.
It has taken on board concepts which for it were extremely difficult and it has accepted much that has been anathema to republicans for over 70 years. All this "to take the gun forever out of Irish politics" (Gerry Adam's words).
Consider that Sinn Fein has, in the Good Friday Agreement and in the Referendum, endorsed the following:
1. The Mitchell Principles. (The gun will never again be used to further a political agenda.)
2. The principle of consent. (The status of Northern Ireland cannot be changed without the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland.)
3. The removal of Articles 2 and 3 from the Irish Constitution. We now sometimes forget how enormous these decisions were for "republicans". They were made after much agonising over the misery and futility of the last 30 years. And they were made before Omagh!
Having made these courageous, difficult, and far reaching decisions which have had such benefit for all; it is totally mystifying to me why the republican movement insists on remaining armed to the teeth and calling on everybody else to show good faith.
At a public meeting of Sinn Fein I put this question to Gerry Adams and his response was ridicule. Sinn Fei makes a virtue of nominating Martin McGuinness to the decommissioning body and trots out the old, tired mantra of not speaking for the IRA. It is the antithesis of democracy that an armed, secret, unelected, tiny group should thwart the declared wishes of the vast majority of the Irish people north and south.
After all Sinn Fein has achieved within the peace process and the huge ideological hurdles it has surmounted, it is only a tiny step for the IRA to actually abandon arms. It is no surrender to turn swords into ploughshares and spears into sickles.
A phone call from P O'Neill to any Garda station to say that there was a van-load of Semtex and guns parked in a safe field nearby is all it would take to put the pressure back on David Trimble to show his good faith and to name the shadow executive.
Would a spokesperson for Sinn Fein please say why he believes the IRA is still refusing to do this? - Yours, etc., John Woods,
Francis Street, Dundalk.