Braverman should ‘cop on’ and stop ‘bizarre’ comments about Northern Ireland - McDonald

The British home secretary Suella Braverman should “cop on” and not make “bizarre” comments about Northern Ireland and on issues she knows little about, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has said.

“I think she needs to cop on, quite frankly. I would advise her, perhaps, not to comment on things of which she clearly has a very sketchy, if any, understanding.

“The big difficulty in this is that comments like that create headlines and there’s public comment on it. It drifts you away from the matter of real concern,” she said.

Ms McDonald was responding to comments by Ms Braverman in an opinion piece for the Times, in which she criticised a planned pro-Palestinian march in London this weekend as displaying the “primacy by certain groups – particularly Islamists – of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”.

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Ms McDonald said that people had gone out on the streets in London, Belfast and Dublin to protest at the devastation that had been experienced in Gaza and in the West Bank.

“To label that as anyway hateful is, to my mind, absolutely unbelievable and bizarre, quite frankly.

“I would urge the British government to reconsider its position and to join with the UN position which is for a ceasefire. That’s the important politics here.”

Ms McDonald and Sinn Féin’s Northern leader Michelle O’Neill were talking to the media at the party’s ardfheis in Athlone, Co Westmeath.

Ms O’Neill said her priority was to get the Northern Ireland Executive up and running but said it was now time for the British government to call time on its negotiations with the DUP about restoring the institutions.

“They’re letting us drift endlessly,” she said. “That’s not a tenable position.”

She said that all the other parties wanted a return of the assembly and an executive to be formed. She said that remained the focus of Sinn Féin but added it would be equally prudent for both governments to plan for scenarios if that does not come to pass.

She said that the British-Irish Council in Dublin on November 24th and 25th would be the appropriate forum to address such issues.