Michelle O’Neill now using PSNI bodyguards – breaking Sinn Fein tradition

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/michelle-oneill-now-using-psni-bodyguards-breaking-sinn-fein-tradition/a318046391.html

Michelle O’Neill has broken with republican tradition and is using PSNI bodyguards.
The news can be revealed as Ms O’Neill prepares to become First Minister this weekend.

For decades, Sinn Fein’s Stormont ministers have refused offers of police protection and have refused even to accept civil service ministerial drivers.

When Martin McGuinness became Education Minister in 1999, a report in The Independent said: “With no chauffeur-driven ministerial car and definitely no RUC bodyguard, Northern Ireland’s new Minister for Education attempted to set a tone of informality for his first official duties yesterday.”

At the time, Sinn Fein said it had made “security arrangements”, which included employing its own ministerial drivers, who were widely believed to double as bodyguards.

Even after the PSNI replaced the RUC, and after Sinn Fein endorsed policing, the policy remained unchanged.

Questions were asked in Parliament and in the Assembly as to whether Sinn Fein’s guards were authorised to carry guns, something the authorities were reluctant to confirm.

The arrangement alluded to Sinn Fein’s distrust of the apparatus of the state; it did not want either police officers or civil servants being omnipresent where they would know the precise movements of the party’s top tier and be privy to many of their conversations.

However, now that has changed. A source told the Belfast Telegraph that Ms O’Neill has quietly been using PSNI close protection officers for some time, with the policemen being spotted ferrying the party’s vice-president between her homes in Tyrone and Belfast and places like Stormont.

This newspaper recently observed Ms O’Neill arriving for an engagement in a car which was followed by the close protection officers in a second vehicle.

When the incoming First Minister got out of her vehicle, the officers followed her at a discreet distance.

Two sources who worked closely with Ms O’Neill in Stormont said that the arrangements represented a very different approach to what had gone before and is another step in Sinn Fein’s journey of normalising policing to republicans.

When asked why it had changed its stance, and when Ms O’Neill had started using PSNI protection, Sinn Fein said: “The First Minister designate is our most prominent local politician.

“Both civilian and police protection support is provided, as required, to support her in carrying out her public functions. We never comment on specific personal security arrangements.”

The PSNI said: “We do not comment of the security of individuals and no inference should be drawn from this.”

For years, Sinn Fein had to pay for its own ministerial drivers because the party declined to use those on offer. However, in 2010 the DUP agreed to allow the party to pay the individuals from public funds, even though DUP Finance Minister Sammy Wilson opposed the move, wanting to cut costs by centralising the ministerial fleet.

That decision was taken despite the fact that at the time Sinn Fein drivers had been involved in six of the seven crashes of ministerial vehicles.

In 2016, it emerged that Martin McGuinness’s hand-picked ministerial driver has been involved in a staggering number of accidents, crashing nine times in as many years” while the First Minister’s civil service driver has never crashed in that period.
In 2014, Mr Wilson’s former special adviser, Graham Craig, said during negotiations about the Stormont budget Sinn Fein was more interested in a “side deal” to get its drivers paid than the allocations to departments.

Mr Craig, an economist who by that stage had joined the UUP and been elected as a councillor in Belfast, said that the issue had been crucial to getting Sinn Fein to agree to the 2011-2015 budget.

Sinn Fein’s desire to use its own people as drivers and security guards has not always worked from the party’s perspective.
In 2008, Roy McShane, Gerry Adams’ long-term driver and bodyguard, vanished into protective custody as it emerged that he had been working as an MI5 informant.

by Ah_here_like