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8 March 2007 Edition

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Sinn Féin Ard Fheis 2007 huge opportunities to take struggle forward

Martina Anderson opening the 2007 Ard Fheis

Martina Anderson opening the 2007 Ard Fheis

Anderson opens Ard Fheis 

Opening Sinn Féin’s 2007 Ard Fheis in Dublin’s RDS in Dublin on Friday evening, 2 March, Martina Anderson, Sinn Féin candidate for Foyle in the upcoming elections said that delegates and visitors were meeting in the midst of two elections which provided huge opportunities to take forward the republican struggle.
She said there was a new dynamic for change in the six Counties. For the first time people have the opportunity to make change.
Anderson reminded those gathered of the momentous events of the past year including commemorations all across the country, to remember the hunger strikers, culminating in the huge Casement Park rally.
These commemorations brought us in touch with a generation of young people, who may not even have been born at the time. But they also gave us the occasion to rededicate ourselves, each and every one of us, to the ideals of the Hunger Strikers, and the impact of their deaths on setting the path to build political strength, as our key national strategic objective.
Sinn Féin was confident that the election, in the long run, would restore the Assembly and with it, the institutions of all Ireland governance because rejectionists had nowhere else to go.

Make power accountable
“Unionists politicians can no longer rely on sectarianism to secure political control of unionist areas. They are obliged to look to the interests of their people, the logic of which lies so clearly in the ending of divisions, within and between our country, which has cut off the Six Counties from the huge economic growth and wealth in the Celtic Tiger economy of the South”, Anderson said.
She said the O’Loan Report, which, thanks to the courage of Raymond McCord, had obliged unionists to recognise, that sectarianism was deliberately perpetrated and perpetuated by the British state, working through collusion with agents in unionist communities, in shocking crimes against humanity. The families of the victims of such collusion had a lesson in how to make power accountable.
“That is our programme of work over the coming years – to make the power of Government accountable and to make accountable the power of policing, to mobilise the people to make power accountable to them.”
With the Assembly restored and the All Ireland Ministerial Council and Areas of Cooperation between departments North and South, there would be two internationally recognised spokespersons for all of the people in Ireland, Anderson said.
“There will be the Taoiseach and there will be the Joint office of the First and the deputy First Ministers. The current Taoiseach has a tendency to forget this, or to wish it were not the case”, she said  


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