Newtownhamilton bombers play into the hands of British securocrats

GERRY ADAMS has said the “small militarist group” that placed a car bomb in Newtownhamilton, County Armagh, last week, injuring two people and causing damage to local property, “dishonour the name of republican”.
Residents have praised the actions of firefighters whose prompt action helped evacuate residents and seal off the area around the bomb, aimed at the local police station.
At a time when republicans have constructed a peaceful and democratic path to achieving a united Ireland, which has popular and growing support, the Sinn Féin president said, these militarists have no strategy and no politics to offer.
He said they appear incapable of doing what successful revolutionaries and those in struggle across the world long ago learned. “That is to review, adapt, change, make struggle relevant in its own place and time and most important of all win popular support.”
Gerry Adams said that it’s not just his view that, without popular support or at the very least the support of a significant section of the population, no group can survive, much less win.
“That’s at the heart of every book ever written on the subject, including those leaders who succeeded in their goals. That’s the lesson of successful struggle worldwide,” he said.
The West Belfast MP observed that, in the Assembly elections three years ago, political representatives of some of these groups stood. They received derisory votes. This time they’re not taking the chance of repeating “that humiliating performance” and have chosen not to stand in the Westminster elections to oppose Sinn Féin.

NOT THE IRA
The Sinn Féin leader is adamant that “these groups are not the IRA”.
“No matter how many letters they put in front of their names, they are not the IRA. The IRA was a people’s army with popular support. It was a sophisticated political army which had strategies and a politicised membership. It also had the courage to debate the merits of the Peace Process and, when a peaceful and democratic path to Irish unity was created, to take big decisions democratically and to honour them.”
And “wannabe” IRA groups like those who placed the bomb in Newtownhamilton play into the hands of those in the Brit system who are dissatisfied with the progress which Sinn Féin has made.
“Instability is the name of the game,” was Gerry Adams’s assessment, appealing to nationalists not to be deflected or distracted by such attacks.
“All democrats must defend the progress that has been made and defend the Peace Process against allcomers. This election gives us that opportunity.”