TUV conference: Jim Allister questions what would be lost if Stormont collapsed - citing First Minister's 'no alternative' comments
Jim Allister has questioned what would be lost if Stormont was to collapse again, pointing to the First Minister’s claim that there was “no alternative” to IRA violence.
The TUV leader also referenced a tribute form Michelle O’Neill to an IRA terrorist who was responsible for burning to death a young shop worker – Yvonne Dunlop – in a firebomb attack.
The Sinn Fein leader caused controversy in 2021 when she paid tribute to her killer Thomas McElwee, who starved to death in an IRA hunger strike backed by the Sinn Fein leadership in 1981.
Ms O’Neill wrote, in Irish, that the hunger strikers “died for Irish freedom”. In a BBC interview in 2022, she said there had been no alternative to IRA violence during the Troubles.
“I think at the time there was no alternative. Now, thankfully, we have an alternative to conflict and that's the Good Friday Agreement”, she said.
Mr Allister told his party conference: “What is Stormont? Well, our First Minister tells us all through her coded language, that it was right and necessary to murder your kith and kin.
“There was no alternative. She now, from the highest office in this land, lauds those murderers. And she does, every year.
“She lauds despicable IRA terrorists, who burned to death a young woman in Main Street in Ballymena – by planting a firebomb.
“Yet where is Michelle O’Neill when that anniversary comes round? Lauding him. No alternative to burning to death the young mother Dunlop.
“No alternative to incinerating twelve people in La Mon. No alternative to taking ten Protestants off a bus at Kingsmills and riddling them with bullets.
“No alternative to killing in cold blood hard working men as they returned in Teebane. No alternative to placing a bomb in a fish shop on the Shankill Road.
“All necessary, all right. That’s what we’d lose if we lost Stormont. A First Minister who wallows in the justification of terrorism. And by that wallowing, indicates to upcoming impressionable generations that terrorism is a viable and correct course of action”.
Ms O’Neill maintains republicans have a right to remember their “patriot dead”.