I knew and liked the family of Robert McCartney and I'm glad that Micheal Martin raised his murder yesterday. His murder - seven years after the Good Friday Agreement - had nothing to do with the Troubles. It was pure thuggery.
There were 70 Sinn Fein activists in the Magennis's bar that night. Robert was beaten and set upon with knives. His friend Brendan Devine was ripped open from his neck to his belly right in the middle of the bar.
Then Robert was dragged out and taken down a lane to be finished off by members of the Short Strand and Markets IRA, many a wife beater among them. The IRA then came back into the busy bar to do a forensic clean up.
SF Mid Ulster Assembly candidate Cora Groogan was in the bar that night. She saw nothing. SF council candidate Deirdre Hargey was in the bar too. She saw nothing. SF council candidate Sean Hayes was in the bar. He also saw nothing.
Nobody in the bar was able to provide any information sufficient to ensure the successful prosecution of Robert's attackers. And the lot of them just back that evening from Derry where they attended the Bloody Sunday commemoration - a protest against the covering up of murder.
Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey put out a press release in the murder's immediate aftermath saying that the death was the result of knife culture that had become too common in Belfast. As if this was some ordinary bar brawl.
Strange that he was so poorly informed when many of his canvassing team were in the bar. Strange too that - rather like Conor Murphy's characterisation of Paul Quinn as a criminal - his comments managed to deflect from the true nature of what happened that night.
Strange also that when the PSNI tried to search houses in the murder's aftermath, it was the police he condemned, rather than the teen rioters who were sent out to disrupt them.
Time has been kind to Deirdre Hargey. She's now Minister for Communities in the new Executive. Time has been good for Alex Maskey too. He's now Speaker of the Assembly. As indeed time has been good for Conor Murphy. He's now Minister for Finance.
As for the McCartneys, not so much. They were intimidated from their homes. And nobody has ever been convicted for Robert's murder. The wall of silence endures to this day.
Say what you like about FF, FG, Labour or the rest, you simply could not gouge the belly of a man in a bar full of their party members and get away with it. The same is not true of Sinn Fein.
This is not just about the past. It is about the present too. It is about whether SF really accepts that its activists and IRA members are to be amenable to the law - at least in respect of their post Agreement actions.
Whether SF accepts that in a Republic all are equal before the law. And whether, by extension, we can be confident that a SF Minister for Justice will countenance security initiatives on money laundering and smuggling that may affect the boys in South Armagh and elsewhere.
That's rather important because - as the last report of the International Monitoring Commission stated - there is a lack of clarity regarding where the proceeds of IRA smuggling, counterfeiting and other criminality ever went.
Therefore the question equally arises as to who may benefit from them to this day.
It is no response to this to state that power sharing exists in Northern Ireland - so we in the South should just get on with it. Because actually the devolved justice department is not allocated under the Agreement's d'Hondt formula.
Instead SF itself agreed to a special arrangement that has seen it held mostly by the Alliance party and never by Sinn Fein.
Micheal Martin is right to identify that there remains something different about Sinn Fein (from about 8.30 mins on) - despite the huge progress made by the party in the last 20 years.
The fact that there has not once been an election of the President of Sinn Fein since 1986 underlines this.
But what he really needs to do is not just make clear what is wrong about SF but how they can put it right to demonstrate their commitment to the equal application of the rule of law. Ending the silence about the McCartney murder would be a decent place to start.
