Yesterday Sinn Féin strategist Sean ‘Spike’ Murray gathered alongside Bobby Singleton, the head of the so called ‘Paramilitary Crime Taskforce’ and various other representatives from state agencies to talk about the threat from so called ‘paramilitaries’ and the hold they have on working class communities.
The Irish Republican Socialist Party have become a major target for the PCTF under the direction of their Sinn Féin cohorts. This has led to the party offices being raided, dozens of party activists homes being torn apart and arrests that have led to no convictions. There has also been a dramatic rise in false and sensational media headlines and reports that have targeted the Irish Republican Socialist movement and its members.
The IRSP are not affected by this attempted onslaught as we have been through worse. We have stood firm at everything the British state have thrown at us over the past 44 years including assassinations. Our only allegiance is to the Irish working class and from this we cannot let this hypocritical position of Sean ‘Spike’ Murray and Sinn Féin go on unchallenged.
In 2015 Sinn Féin along with the DUP and the Alliance Party signed up to Tory austerity & cuts in Ireland by signing off on welfare reform. Since its introduction, welfare reform has had a devastating impact on working class communities. On a near daily basis the IRSP are dealing with people becoming under threat from evictions from the housing executive and loosing vital benefits that have been unfairly altered or changed by the introduction of Universal Credit, the golden child of Tory Austerity. These cuts have led to suicides and attempted suicides and they have led to an increase in homelessness and drug use.
The Sinn Féin/Tory cuts don’t just stop at benefits. Our schools and health departments are at a crisis level due to a sever lack of funding. NHS waiting lists continue to rise and our schools are having trouble paying the heating and electric bill so that they can educate our children to give them a decent future.
The PSNI were awarded £50 million to fund this so called ‘Paramilitary Crime Taskforce’, a force that takes its orders from the National Crime Agency (NCA), who are not accountable under any public policing structures, but take their orders from MI5 in Holywood and London.
This funding was given to the PSNI with absolutely zero opposition from Sinn Féin, while at the same time they claim there is no funding to help the hundreds of people who are currently having to wait at least 38 weeks to seek help to get onto a heroin substitute programme. Heroin has gripped our working class areas to the point it has now become an epidemic that carries with it devastating social consequences that our communities may not ever recover from.
While it may be easy for the likes of Sinn Féin ‘shot caller’ Sean ‘Spike’ Murray to sit in these tea party private invitation events and pretend that the working class are benefiting from these PSNI funding scams, the IRSP remain on the ground and working within our communities trying to help limit the economic chaos that has been Welfare Reform, chaos that has been caused by Sinn Féin and other anti-working class parties. Yes we do ask Sinn Féin and our public bodies to ‘end the harm’, we ask them to stop welfare reform before it tries to evict more people from their homes and drives more working class people to drugs or to their ultimate and untimely deaths.
