All three main unionist parties have challenged Sinn Féin on its support for policing, following last Saturday’s New IRA car bomb outside Dunmurry police station in south Belfast.

Sinn Féin has strongly condemned the attack in statements from multiple representatives. First Minister Michelle O’Neill reiterated this in a joint press conference at Stormont with her DUP counterpart Emma Little-Pengelly, alongside PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher and policing board chair Brendan Mullan. The republican party has done everything required by what it once dismissed as “the politics of condemnation”.

Unionists remain unsatisfied on two grounds. First, they say Sinn Féin is sending dangerously mixed messages by condemning violence in the present while justifying it in the past.

The DUP and UUP called on Sinn Féin to declare that bombing police stations has always been wrong. The TUV made a more pointed reference to the “irony” of Órlaithí Flynn, a Sinn Féin assembly member for Dunmurry, condemning the bomb. Her father planted an IRA bomb on a train in Dunmurry in 1980, killing two passengers. Sinn Féin gave no response when asked if Flynn condemned her father’s actions.

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