Unionist attack on Sen. Ted Kennedy

A unionist politician from Northern Ireland has launched an extraordinary attack on Senator Ted Kennedy, telling the British parliament that awarding the Senator an honorary knighthood was in “extremely poor taste.”

Sammy Wilson, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Northern Ireland’s Minister for the Environment, accused Kennedy of being an IRA sympathizer.

He said that “a cloud still hangs over” Kennedy, for having been expelled from Harvard and for having fled the scene of a crash at Chappaquiddick, in which a 29-year-old woman died.

Wilson said that Kennedy opposed the sale of U.S. arms to the old Northern Ireland police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and that he had called on Protestants to “go back to Britain.”

“Senator Kennedy has consistently supported the political wing of the IRA which for many decades killed a great number of innocent civilians,” Wilson said in a motion calling on the British Government to drop the knighthood plans.

“Senator Kennedy is being awarded a knighthood for services to the U.K-U.S. relationship and services to Northern Ireland despite the fact that he has for many years supported the break-up of the United Kingdom and has explicitly sought to deny the wishes of the majority of people in Northern Ireland by supporting calls for Northern Ireland to cease to exist and become part of the Republic of Ireland.”

Wilson’s motion was supported by his party colleagues.

A number of politicians from the Conservative Party have also questioned the decision to award Kennedy the knighthood. Members of Parliament, Ann and Nicholas Winterton, supported Wilson’s motion.

Lord Tebbit, a former minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, whose wife was confined to a wheelchair after the IRA bombed a party conference in 1984, told the Daily Mail that the knighthood was “wholly inappropriate.”

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Nster.com