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DUBLIN — An Irish Republican Army funeral that broke pandemic restrictions is deepening the rift within Northern Ireland’s supposed unity government.
The Democratic Unionists, who support continued union with the U.K., on Tuesday called for an independent investigation into how largely unmasked crowds of supporters of long-time political rivals Sinn Féin, were permitted to gather for June 2020 ceremonies saluting Provisional IRA veteran Bobby Storey.
At the time, the Northern Ireland Executive co-led by Sinn Féin had capped funeral attendances at 30 — not the thousands who lined the streets of Catholic west Belfast that day.
A nine-month investigation overseen by Cumbria Police in northern England recommended prosecutions of 24 elected Sinn Féin officials who attended at least some of the five-stage ceremony, replete with a uniformed guard of honor. It stretched from Storey’s family home to the Provisional IRA plot in Milltown Cemetery all the way to a second cemetery on the Protestant east side of Belfast.
But the Public Prosecution Service in Belfast on Tuesday published a nine-page judgment concluding that Sinn Féin politicians — among them senior Provisionals like Storey and a new generation not linked to bloodshed — had a good chance of defeating any charges of willfully violating pandemic rules.
The prosecutors cited two key grounds of contention. First, ill-drafted and shifting pandemic rules in place at the time created exploitable legal loopholes. But more importantly, Sinn Féin officials had spent the previous week liaising behind the scenes with police officers to agree bespoke ground rules for Storey’s sendoff.
First Minister Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist leader, said she had fully expected prosecutors to levy charges against Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, her Sinn Féin co-leader of the Northern Ireland Executive.
“When what was seen by everyone is not seen by the justice system, the situation has become absurd,” said Foster, whose press conference was briefly interrupted by a tractor driving past loudly in the background.
“Sinn Féin have acted as though they were above the law. To claim ignorance of the law is no defense when you helped legislate those very same regulations,” she said.
Foster demanded that Chief Constable Simon Byrne, the commander of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, resign because his officers had been seen to facilitate law-breaking.
But Byrne, an Englishman appointed to Northern Ireland’s top security job two years ago after holding senior policing posts in London and Manchester, said he wouldn’t quit.
“The decision not to prosecute does not change our view that what happened last summer when large numbers of people chose not to stay at home at the height of a global pandemic was unnecessary, irresponsible and insensitive,” Byrne said.
The fallout raises tempers in an Executive already showing signs of unraveling in familiar fashion. Foster, who refused for months to hold press conferences with O’Neill following the Storey funeral, said she hadn’t decided yet whether to resume that boycott with a joint event scheduled for Thursday.
A power-sharing Executive that forced British Protestants and Irish Catholics to work together was a cornerstone of the U.K. region’s Good Friday peace accord of 1998. But relations have forced Britain to mothball the Executive several times and retake the reins of government, most recently from 2017 to 2020. That crisis was triggered when Sinn Féin withdew, citing irreconcilable differences with Foster.
Basic government functions in Belfast continue to be undermined by that bad blood. Foster and O’Neill have spent months at loggerheads on appointing a new head of the civil service.
Foster faces growing pressure from the hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice party to stop facilitating Sinn Féin in government and to pull the plug on power-sharing.
Its leader, Jim Allister, called Tuesday on unionists to withdraw from the cross-community board that oversees the police. He also questioned the rationale of lockdown rules, given the flexibility provided to Sinn Féin.
“If Michelle O’Neill can assemble, with immunity, with 2,000 others to bury a terrorist,” he said, “why can’t I take a walk with my wife on a beach?”
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