TD’s ‘Anti-Semitic and Anti-Science’ remarks
26.03.2020
There are some pretty weird people in Dáil Eireann since the 2020 general election; take for example Réada Cronin, 56, now a Sinn Féin TD for Kildare North. Apart from her gross and crude language, her social media contributions should make you scratch your head. You might wonder why a self-proclaimed responsible party failed to disown her long before the General Election took place. For instance, on her public Twitter page, she claimed that Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous defeat in December last year was engineered by the "lies, deceit, fake news, and the sinister activities of the [Israeli] Mossad Secret Service”. She posted that Israel had “taken Nazism to a new level” and suggested that a picture of monkeys working on computers reminded her of the Israeli embassy. When challenged, she called her tweets “throwaway remarks”. Previously, Cronon linked the Rothschilds with Hitler, repeated the theory that the purpose of fluride in water is to sedate the population, and wondered if “loads of [Irish] judges” might not be paedophiles.
The resulting row over her anti-Semitism forced Mary Lou McDonald to meet Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, who called Cronin’s remarks “inaccurate, anti-Semitic and racist”. Explaining how a mature woman of 56 didn’t mean to offend anyone maybe an “impossible thing”.
Sinn Féin director of elections passed off Cronin’s “glib, off the cuffe” remarks, noting that they “were not in keeping with Sinn Féin’s policy”. Cronin’s daft beliefs should give pause to anyone considering if SF is the party of the future. Is this the kind of change the country needs?