Sinn Féin’s two leaders, Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill, visited London early this week to hold meetings on Brexit with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Karen Bradley, the Tory minister with responsibility for the north of Ireland — previously renowned for her wildly insensitive and completely ahistorical comments on violence perpetrated by British soldiers in the north before the ceasefire.

As always happens in press appearances by the party’s leaders, both were asked if Sinn Féin would take their seats in the British parliament to break the stalemate over Brexit, and both, as ever said they would not.

The question is endlessly trotted out by the media and Sinn Féin’s political opponents. Recently, Fine Gael’s health minister Simon Harris tweeted criticism of the party for not taking their Westminster seats, a handy deflection from the health crisis currently underway in Ireland. Harris deliberately misrepresents the reason Sinn Féin practice abstentionism, while many others simply do not understand and have no desire to learn.