IN June 2016, Mid and East Antrim council employed contractors to enter the majority nationalist village of Carnlough on the Antrim coast in the middle of the night and destroy a republican monument that had been illegally erected a few months previously to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising.

At the time, the Sinn Féin MLA for the area, Oliver McMullan, bitterly condemned the incident.

The unionist majority on the council had never countenanced destroying any of the plethora of loyalist memorials dotted across the area.

Indeed, just a few years earlier, the same unionist parties on the then Larne Borough Council (before it merged to form the new authority) had voted to erect a large crown at a roundabout without any prior planning approval.

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The Carnlough decision amounted to a statement by unionist parties to nationalists that they really should know their place.

There are few – if any........

© The Irish News