The North’s Regional Development Minister Conor Murphy, with his IRA past and his current role as a senior Sinn Féin politician, has been accused of many things, but a new charge was added to the list by his SDLP rival, Dominic Bradley, in the Newry and Armagh constituency, where Mr Murphy is the abstentionist MP.
It was “impossible to count the bends on the Newry-Crossmaglen road because none of it is really straight”, said Mr Bradley, and that was all the Minister’s fault. The SDLP man said that in the last election Sinn Féin complained of discrimination because it took as long to drive from Newry to Crossmaglen as Newry to Belfast. Now it took longer.