Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill to attend Remembrance Sunday event

Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill is to become the first senior Sinn Féin figure to take part in an official Remembrance Sunday ceremony in Belfast.

Several Sinn Féin politicians have laid wreaths at the Cenotaph in Belfast in previous years, but they have not attended the main Sunday ceremony.

O’Neill has confirmed she has accepted an invitation and she will lay a laurel wreath at the Cenotaph on Sunday in her role as first minister.

O’Neill said her attendance was a demonstration of her determination to fulfil her pledge to be a “first minister for all”.

Speaking to the PA news agency, O’Neill said she appreciated some republicans would be “uncomfortable” with her attendance, but she insisted it was nevertheless the “right thing do do”.

The first minister added that when she took up the job in February she had pledged represent everybody in society.

“This is about acknowledgement of loss, but it’s also about being respectful to all those people out there and fulfilling my commitment to be first minister for all.”

More than 20 years have passed since Alex Maskey became the first Sinn Féin lord mayor to pay his respects to the war dead at the Cenotaph at Belfast City Hall.

On 1 July 2002 he laid a laurel wreath at the monument, hours ahead of the main council ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.

Maskey described his gesture as a “major step for republicans and nationalists on this island”.

However, he would not attend the main ceremony that year, refusing to take part in a “military commemoration” of the Somme.

Since then, Sinn Féin politicians always declined to attend Cenotaph wreath laying ceremonies in any official capacity.

In the years that have passed, there have been made other firsts and many other gestures in a bid to promote reconciliation.

In 2016, the late Martin McGuinness travelled to France and Belgium as part of a two-day trip to World War One battlefields.

He laid wreaths at the sites where the Somme and the Battle of Messines took place a century earlier.