Ben Lowry: Reports of masked men at Roselawn are a reminder of how the IRA were allowed to take over the facility for Bobby Storey funeral
Belfast City Council and the PSNI are investigating this incident, and rightly so.
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Hide AdBut we must not forget what happened at Roselawn in 2020, during lockdown, when it was closed by the council to facilitate the funeral of the leading IRA terrorist Bobby Storey.
And that outrageous event followed an earlier huge show of strength by the IRA in west Belfast when the police helped Sinn Fein and other republican leaders in a mass breach of covid rules in order to facilitate the Storey funeral.
That SF had been the most sanctimonious political party when it came to lockdown made the affair all the more grotesque.
My own parents died two years later and in the case of my mum funeral restrictions had still not been lifted when she died in early 2022. But while tens of thousands of mourners obeyed these restrictions, the IRA refused to do so. That was bad enough. What followed made it worse. A raft of investigations found that, in effect, no-one was to blame. It was as if it just happened. (Click here to read Ben Lowry in 2021 saying that the probes were all like impossible staircases that just brought you back to where you began)
The whole saga was an ominous illustration of the special treatment given by the authorities in NI to the IRA and their apologists.
Ben Lowry is News Letter editor