Purge your contempt for law – Flanagan

Minister takes SF to task

FOREIGN Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has told Sinn Féin it needs to purge its contempt for the courts and the rule of law if the party is to become ‘politically acceptable’.

His comments come in the wake of controversy surrounding the 1983 shooting of prison officer Brian Stack and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams’s role in providing information about the culprits. This criticism carries real weight, given the Foreign Affairs Minister’s status as a custodian of the Good Friday Agreement.

‘Sinn Féin and individuals within that party have a history and tradition of contempt for the courts, officers of the courts and the rule of law,’ Mr Flanagan said. He warned: ‘They are going to have to purge that contempt from within if they are ever to become politically acceptable.’

Mr Adams, in 2013, brought the prisoner officer’s sons, Austin and Oliver Stack, to a meeting with a senior IRA figure to learn more about the shooting of their father. Mr Adams later provided names to gardaí of people allegedly involved in the murder and said he got those names from the Stack family, which they deny. Austin Stack this week confronted Mr Adams at a press conference, accused him of lying and demanded more transparency regarding his father’s killing, urging the Sinn Féin leader to turn over more details to gardaí.

Mr Adams has said he will not name the senior IRA figure he brought the Stack family to meet to get information on their father’s killing.

The Sinn Féin leader also rejected the Taoiseach’s call for him to identify the driver of a blacked-out van that he used to make the trip across the border with Austin and Oliver Stack in 2013. And he failed to address whether it was appropriate for an elected representative to engage in such subterfuge in the course of a meeting with someone with full knowledge of a murder. Mr Adams instead said the trip had been a genuine attempt to aid the Stacks. He had agreed a process with the Stack brothers, which could only take place if it was confidential.

Meanwhile, senior Sinn Féin figures have told the MoS that Mary Lou McDonald is well ahead in the race to succeed Gerry Adams as leader. ‘Mary Lou is really well-known where it matters in the North,’ said a senior figure. ‘In west Belfast, Derry and south Armagh she is very popular.’

‘A history and tradition of contempt’