Give me the child

Maybe best that I just post this as it came to me. The highlighting at the end is all I will admit to as it sums up my thoughts when I heard this on the radio.

Convicted IRA trio take top portfolios in Sinn Fein line-up-News-Politics-TimesOnline


Three convicted IRA members will take the majority of Sinn Fein’s ministries in Northern Ireland’s incoming power-sharing Executive next month...Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister, as well as Gerry Kelly and Conor Murphy.

Mr Kelly, 54, was convicted of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, in which one person died and 180 were injured. In 1983 he led the Maze prison breakout by Provisional IRA prisoners, in which a prison officer died of a heart attack after being stabbed.

Mr Kelly was eventually found in the Netherlands, from where he was suspected of playing a role in the IRA’s mainland Europe campaign aimed at British Army bases.

He was extradited back to Northern Ireland and, after his release from prison, became a senior Sinn Fein member. At the time of the party’s first talks with the Government more than a decade ago, he was reportedly serving as the IRA’s “adjutant general”.

He represents North Belfast in the Assembly and has been Sinn Fein’s justice and police spokesman.

Conor Murphy, the MP for Newry and Armagh, served five years for possession of weapons and membership of the Provisional IRA. He has been tipped as a successor to Gerry Adams as party leader.

Mr McGuinness admitted to being an IRA leader at the time of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972, and has been named as a former chief of staff of the Provisional IRA under parliamentary privilege, in books quoting senior republican sources and by senior security and government sources.

The same sources say that he, along with Mr Adams, remains a member of the IRA’s ruling “army council”


A lovely bunch, and par for the course. The interesting aspect is this:

Sinn Fein surprised Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists by choosing the education portfolio as its first choice under the d’Hondt system of distributing the Cabinet seats.

Mr McGuinness was Education Minister in the previous Executive, which was suspended in October 2002 over allegations of an IRA spy-ring at Stormont.

Mr McGuinness’s final act as Education Minister was to abolish Northern Ireland’s grammar school system

As the old Jesuit motto says: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."

Would you be happy to have this man in charge of the compulsory schooling of your child?