Press release/Preas Ráiteas

On April 1st 2014 PRO of Comhairle Laighean (Leinster Executive), Republican Sinn Féin said the following:

With the summer season quickly approaching the “Northern Ireland” tourist board is stepping up its “Discover Northern Ireland” campaign to illustrate all the area offers to those living in the Free State and beyond. Slogans such as “it’s only a few miles up the road” are uttered in a campaign which portrays the 6 counties of Ireland as being a separate country. The campaign doesn’t mention it’s an artificially partitioned area carved out by a gerrymandered sectarian head count. It is campaigns like this that continue to normalise a foreign occupation of our country. A crude attempt to saturate Irish people with partitionist marketing and normalise the idea that the occupied 6 counties is a separate country, a separate entity, which people of the Free State can visit in a “tourist capacity”. As republicans we must resist these constant attempts we are barraged with by the Stormont assembly, British media and the traditional shoneen population. The British occupation of Ireland, in all its manifestations, was never normal. It is never normal, and it never will be normal.

You need only speak to visitors on our shores from countries like Australia, America and all around Europe. They will tell you of the excursions they pay vast sums of money for. They will tell you of the Tour operators who bring them to both “Southern” and “Northern Ireland” to visit cities like “London” Derry. They are herded like cattle around Belfast to take photos of murals at various locations and are told stories of “The Troubles”, times long since passed they are led to believe. However no attempt to highlight the root cause of the conflict is ever mentioned and revisionist theories of a lasting peace are instead sold to the 3 million plus visitors a year.

Our troubled past means much more than a foreign tourist board using it to prostitute the 6 counties history to bolster its coffers. It is this history which we should learn from so as not to repeat the same cycle again. Depressingly however this is not happening and the same conditions remain in place. This is the reality not told to the visitors who come here, they are filled with Guinness and the notion “the bad old days” have been and gone. However history tells us whilst the idea of “Northern” Ireland is forced upon us this is not the case. We do not seek to “Discover Northern Ireland” we want rid of it once and for all.

Reject the occupation.  Join Republican Sinn Féin.

Críoch/Ends

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