Beating the bigots

By Carál Ní Chuilín

The murder this week of father of four Kevin McDaid in Coleraine and the attempted murder of Damian Fleming by a loyalist mob was barbaric and it showed once again the depth of sectarian hatred which still haunts our society.
My thoughts at this time go to Kevin McDaid’s wife Evelyn who was also injured in the attacks and to the family of Damian Fleming who is still fighting for his life.
This murder is made all the more poignant in that it happened at a time when a public inquiry is being held into the murder of Robert Hamill in 1997.
Like Kevin McDaid Robert Hamill was killed by an Orange mob in his native town simply because of his religious persuasion.
We have made enormous progress since then but sectarian hatred continues to blight many areas in the North and loyalist paramilitaries continue to orchestrate sectarian violence against nationalists.
Sectarianism has no place in our society and it must be challenged and faced down by all political and community leaders.
As political representatives we have a particular duty to lead by example and oppose bigotry in all its forms.
We must unite to tackle those who are determined to drag us back to darker days and we must stand shoulder to shoulder in telling the sectarian thugs responsible for the murder of Kevin McDaid that they have nothing to offer.
We can’t allow the bigots to derail the progress made to date and the best answer to the sectarian gang who killed Kevin McDaid, simply because he was a Catholic, is to recommit ourselves to a future based on partnership, on equality, on respect and on human rights for all.

A vote for all?
In 1968 the Civil Rights Association, People’s Democracy and Irish republicans took to the streets of this state in pursuit of equal rights for all.
One of the key demands of the CRA was ‘One man, One vote’, and while that slogan of the late ‘60s wouldn’t cut the mustard for women activists today, it was about achieving the right of all people to the vote on an equal basis.
The Civil Rights Movement was eventually successful in achieving this key demand.
However, as republican voting strength and representation has grown in the North of Ireland over the last 30 years there has been a new and concerted attempt to disenfranchise nationalist voters.
Firstly, voters here face ID checks which are unheard of anywhere else in Ireland or in Britain.
This measure disproportionately affects people from working-class communities who do not always possess the forms of ID demanded by the electoral office.
When this failed to stop the growth of the Republican vote throughout the ‘90s the British government brought in annual registration of voters.
This succeeded in removing more than 100,000 voters from the electoral register.
Nationalist working-class voters were the big losers in this.
Sinn Féin and other parties lobbied for years to reverse this policy.
The British government eventually did a U-turn allowing voters to remain registered at their home address for up to ten years.
Any hope however, that the electoral office would help rebuild a flawed electoral register were quickly dashed.
Under the stewardship of the current Chief Electoral Officer Douglas Bain our party has taken a growing number of complaints that citizens are being denied postal and proxy votes.
Families of eight people or more, many of them nationalist families, are also being disqualified from the register.
At present there are nearly 200,000 people who are entitled to vote but who are not on the register.
Put simply people are once again being denied their democratic right to vote as a result of incompetence or something more sinister.
It is all the more important therefore that those whose vote hasn’t yet been stolen by the electoral office come out on June 4 and use it.
You should show once again by giving Bairbre de Brún the strongest possible mandate that no amount of attempted vote rigging will stop the republican advance to a United Ireland of Equals.