Alleged IRA Crimes Increase Sinn Fein’s Political Isolation

Facing sharp public criticism over their party’s alleged links to a recent killing and a bank heist, leaders of Sinn Fein expressed sympathy to some of the family members of the victim at their annual conference Saturday and denied the organization was in crisis.

Sinn Fein is the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, an outlawed group that has fought British rule in Northern Ireland. The party has come under withering attack since the Jan. 30 killing of a man outside a Belfast pub, and Sinn Fein suspended seven members Thursday in relation to the stabbing after intense pressure from the victim’s family.

As four sisters of Robert McCartney sat in the front row of the conference, party leader Gerry Adams said the killers “should admit what they did in a court of law. That’s the only decent thing for them to do.”

Adams offered sympathy but no new commitments to the McCartneys, who have alleged that the IRA is intimidating witnesses to the attack.

The family left the conference saying they were not satisfied. They said that none of 72 potential witnesses had given police statements identifying the attackers, whose names are said to be known in the McCartneys’ Belfast neighborhood of Short Strand, an IRA power base.

“These men murdered my brother. Everyone knows who they are,” Catherine McCartney said.

Their outspoken criticism of the IRA is almost unheard of in their neighborhood, and it is indicative of the deep problems facing Sinn Fein. Not only is the party under unprecedented pressure from a traditional local heartland over the stabbing, it is facing fire from political opponents and governments over the killing and a $50-million bank heist also blamed on the IRA.

Sinn Fein chief negotiator Martin McGuinness told conference delegates Friday that the party was facing a crisis that could end Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord.

But on Saturday, other officials denied that Sinn Fein was in crisis.

“Do you see a sense of crisis in here? No, absolutely not,” said Sean Kerr, a district councilor. “We see ourselves as locked in a struggle for the reunification of our country and that’s the thing that drives our party.”

In one sign of the political isolation facing Sinn Fein, no members of the U.S. Congress attended the conference for the first time in more than a decade. The main international guests included members of South Africa’s African National Congress, representatives of the Palestinian Authority and Basque separatists from Spain.

The Bush administration confirmed Thursday that Sinn Fein and other Northern Ireland parties would not be invited to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day for the first time since 1995.