VIDEO FOOTAGE has surfaced of a Sinn Fein campaign van playing a pro-IRA song during a canvassing trip around Cavan.
The clip, which was filmed last Thursday, February 6, was passed on to BBC series The Nolan Show and shows the van parked in Kingscourt, Co Cavan, playing the Wolfe Tones’ song Celtic Symphony.
It features the contentious lyrics: “ooh ah up the ra”.
According to the report, the van belongs to the campaign team behind Sinn Fein candidate Pauline Tully.
The incident comes off the back of a difficult week for Sinn Fein and the party’s finance minister in Northern Ireland Conor Murphy who was heavily criticised for remarks made about 21-year-old Paul Quinn.
Quinn was brutally murdered in 2007 and while his family has always maintained he was killed by dissident republicans, Murphy told the BBC there was no republican involvement in the murder.
Speaking just after Quinn’s death, he instead linked the killing of the Cullyhanna youth to criminal activity.
A Sinn Fein election van blasts out "Ooh ah up the ra" yesterday afternoon while playing the Wolfe Tones to the public in Cavan.
Is that appropriate electioneering for a political party?
Nelson McCausland | @7815PWK
🎧 https://t.co/he3M36J6ch pic.twitter.com/poYmQfig1p— The Nolan Show, BBC (@BBCNolan) February 7, 2020
A former councillor for the Ballyjamesduff Electoral Area running in the Cavan/Monaghan constituency, Tully was married to former Provisional IRA member Pearse McAuley.
In 1999 McAuley was handed a 10-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe during an attempted robbery in 1996.
Tully and McAuley met while he was serving time behind bars for the crime.
They eventually married after the former Provisional IRA man was handed a temporary release in 2003 to complete the nuptials.
The couple went on to have two sons following his release in 2009, however McAuley ended up back behind bars in 2015 after stabbing the then-estranged Tully 13 times on Christmas Eve of 2014 in front of their two children.
He was handed a 12-year sentence.
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