God forgive me and pardon me for saying so, but I will never vote for Sinn Féin again. And I speak here as someone who has never voted for any other party since the day I registered to vote for the first time. 

Not only that, but I have always encouraged my friends and family to vote for Sinn Féin in all elections all over the country. I was delighted a few years ago when one of my student sons told me he had actually joined the party. All that came to an end, however, just before Christmas, and this is the reason why. 

Just before Christmas last year, Foras na Gaeilge (the all-Ireland body set up under the Good Friday agreement) decided to remove the paltry grant that they were giving to Lá Nua, the Irish language’s one and only daily newspaper. 

Set up in west Belfast, a quarter of a century ago, in fact the first edition was published the day after young Seán Downes was murdered by the RUC on the Andersonstown Road.

A daily newspaper was always a dream of the Irish language movement until we achieved it here, in Béal Feirste. That is, until Nollaig 2008 when Foras na Gaeilge proposed that the meagre grant they gave annually to Lá Nua should be stopped, knowing that this would mean the end of the paper. When the proposal to kill off Lá Nua was put to the meeting,  amazingly, the four Sinn Féin representatives on the board of Foras nodded their acquiescence. 

We always assumed that Sinn Féin supported Irish so much that they would have banged the table, and shouted and roared their opposition to this act of short sighted cultural homicide. 

But no, Sinn Féin agreed totally, with the result that Lá Nua, the first and only Irish language daily is no more and ten people in west Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter were dumped onto the dole and started 2009 out of work.

The amount of money involved was miniscule. So, it’s no more votes from me and mine for Sinn Féin. 

Politics, you see is a two way street: we vote our politicians into positions of power and influence, but we expect them to stick up for us when the time comes and the chips are down. Unfortunately, on this occasion Sinn Féin turned their backs on Belfast’s Irish speakers. 

Now I am just one small citizen with little or no means to hit back at Sinn Féin for what they did to Lá, but I do have my vote. And, I do have the ability to influence my friends and family as to how they vote. I am also in the happy position of being able to bring a disgraceful situation like this to the attention of the readers of the North Belfast News.

So folks, I leave it with you. We all have our votes to cast as we see fit. I thought that Sinn Féin could be trusted as regard to the Irish language. I was wrong. Now I wonder, can they be trusted with anything?