Sign of changed times

Sinn Féin to attend King Charles’ coronation in sign of changed times

Michelle O’Neill, deputy leader of the Irish republican party, says she’ll go to the ceremony to show she respects British side of her Northern Ireland community.

BY SHAWN POGATCHNIK

The Irish republicans of Sinn Féin — who once supported Irish Republican Army attacks on British royals — announced Wednesday they will send senior representatives to the coronation of King Charles III in a sign of radically changed times.

Michelle O’Neill, the party’s deputy leader and first minister-designate for the mothballed Northern Ireland government, said she would represent Sinn Féin at the May 6 ceremony at Westminster Abbey.

O’Neill, who wants the Democratic Unionists to end their year-long boycott of power-sharing and permit her to take the helm of government in Belfast for the first time, said she was making the commitment as a way to demonstrate her respect for unionists and their British identity.

“I am committed to being a first minister for all, representing the whole community, and advancing peace and reconciliation through respectful and mature engagement,” O’Neill said in a statement.

Sinn Féin has traveled a long way from the days when the outlawed IRA was bombing and shooting in hopes of making Northern Ireland an ungovernable corner of the United Kingdom. These days it’s the Democratic Unionists making it ungovernable and Sinn Féin — 26 years removed from a lasting IRA cease-fire and now the top vote-getter in Northern Ireland — positioning itself as the responsible party of government.

Joining O’Neill at Westminster Abbey will be Alex Maskey, the Sinn Féin speaker of the shuttered Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast.

Maskey continues to hold that caretaker position only because the Democratic Unionists have blocked the formation of a new government following the assembly elections in May 2022. Sinn Féin is entitled to the top post of first minister for the first time because it overtook the DUP in that election to become the largest party, with 27 seats in the 90-member assembly compared to the DUP’s 25.

Power-sharing is a central goal of the Good Friday Agreement, the U.S.-brokered peace deal struck in 1998. But it has fallen apart over the past year as the DUP protests against the erection of a so-called Irish Sea border as part of Northern Ireland’s special post-Brexit trading rules agreed between the U.K. and EU in 2019 and refined in February in a compromise agreement called the Windsor Framework.

Sinn Féin’s latest diplomatic move is not surprising given the pattern of its steps over the past quarter-century to normalize relations with Britain, particularly the monarchy. It coincides with the party’s launch this week of its campaign to overtake the DUP, too, in Northern Ireland’s local councils in a May 18 election.

The party was widely criticized for boycotting Queen Elizabeth II’s landmark 2011 visit to the Republic of Ireland but fixed that the following year when Martin McGuinness — a former IRA commander who became Sinn Féin’s deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland government alongside a DUP first minister — shook hands with the queen at Stormont, the government center overlooking Belfast.

The IRA repeatedly plotted to attack members of the royal family, most notoriously when it blew up a yacht carrying Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979, killing the World War II hero and three others aboard, including two children. Mountbatten was Elizabeth’s second cousin and close to Charles.

But Charles already has demonstrated cordial relations with Sinn Féin during his regular visits to both parts of Ireland, including a particularly friendly exchange with O’Neill last year at Hillsborough Castle following his mother’s death, when the new king noted — right in front of DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson — how Sinn Féin was now the biggest party thanks to its “skill and ingenuity.”

The Rubicon yet to be crossed: taking seats in Westminster. Sinn Féin currently holds seven of Northern Ireland’s 18 seats in the House of Commons but has refused to take the oath of office — which requires expressing loyalty to the king — and maintains a policy of abstention.

It used to boycott electoral politics in both parts of Ireland, too, but started competing in the 1980s and over the past decade has rapidly grown to become the main opposition party in the Republic of Ireland.