Sir, – Eoghan MacCormaic has challenged (Letters, December 13th) my use of the prefix “original” to describe the Sinn Féin party founded by Edward Martyn, Arthur Griffith and others in Dublin in 1905 (An Irishman’s Diary, December 12th).
The High Court in Dublin ruled in October 1948 that the contemporary Sinn Féin organisation was not in any legal sense “a continuation of the organisation which had held its two ardfheiseanna in 1922 and which had melted away in the course of that year as a result of the political strife culminating in the Civil War” and, further, that it could not “substantiate any claim to the property of the members of the organisation existing in 1922”. (See Gerard Hogan, The Bar Review, July 1997).
Another split in 1970 in the post-Civil War Sinn Féin resulted in the creation of Official Sinn Féin and Provisional Sinn Féin, both of which subsequently begat further offshoots. – Yours, etc.
RAY BURKE,
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Co Dublin.