Just for a moment imagine you felt in your heart you were prepared to take uparms for what you believe in.

Everyone in the community you live supports this cause. You open the Republican News and Sinn Fein tells you what has been going on in every nationalist community in the North of Ireland and how British occupation is wrong and it's police force are responsible for murder in nationalist areas and the unionist stormont government must be smashed.

You are 22 years of age and become involved. You receive a prison sentence of 16 years. You join the dirty protest to obtain Political Status in the H blocks. You don't leave your cell for five years (you receive no visits from friends or family).

That was a long time ago, you gave your youth, your freedom and a relationship to that cause you believed in. Now Sinn Fein don't want to know you, they call you a dinosaur. They have become part of the very system you fought against and they admired you for, they now sit on a British policing board and tell nationalists to welcome these police officers into your life, even join them.

Yes the very same police officers that held you for seven days and tortured you into signing a confession for things you had nothing to do with, (the word of two senior officers was enough to give you seven years for membership.How can you support these very same officers who searched your home, Spat on your childs pillow, passed a happy 30 minutes together searching your daughters bedrooms while they were present and not allowed to leave, and called them and your wife whores.

Sinn Fein don't want ex-prisoners in the party,they want "clean skins", great to see young people with degrees doing well for themselves in the party, but they are not republicans, and have no idea of recent history.

Peace will come to Ireland, but it will come through a united Europe with token borders, not at the hands of the British, or their "puppets in power" British Sinn Fein.

The fight is not out of the Irish nation, it's like a long term relationship you have been in and just found out the person you thought you knew and trusted,turned out to be a lying, cheating bastard.