ARichTeaBiscuit travelled to Down Coastal, with the Sinn Fein candidate supporting the campaign of party colleague, realbassist.

“Hello there,

I understand that some of you may be wondering why I am here today, however, I can guarantee that I haven’t gotten massively lost but I am here to support the campaign of an excellent party colleague and friend, realbassist and to promote some of the policies included in our excellent manifesto.

I feel that it is important for me to address some of the attacks that I have seen levelled by the UWP against our candidates in this election campaign, now for whatever reason the UWP have gotten it around their heads to try and claim that Sinn Fein is running a sectarian and rather nasty campaign, however, I think that the opposite is quite true.

If you look at the last term then you’ll see quite clearly that Sinn Fein put forward precisely zero sectarian or offensive motions or pieces of legislation, as we instead focused on improving the healthcare service and bringing extra support for our education system, unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the UWP who brought forward inflammatory motions to attempt to gloss over the history of this part of Ireland.

I think it is quite something to put forward offensive and inflammatory motions before the Assembly and then cry foul to receive a passionate response from a member of the Nationalist community, to be it is akin to someone purposefully baiting someone on a social media platform and then complaining when you get the desired response, the fact that the UWP have made this incident the cornerstone of their campaign to me underlines that they don’t have any way to attack Sinn Fein from a policy perspective and so have to fallback to sectarian divides to try and bolster their polling.

I have always been a fan of policy over enforcing such divisions, so I would like to speak to you all a bit about healthcare. In the last term I was overjoyed to hear that Sinn Fein had managed to achieve something which had been the goal of politicians in this part of Ireland for quite some time, namely securing critical investments to both increase the number of ICU beds, reduce waiting times and improve the quality of cancer services in Northern Ireland, with the latter being far behind the rest of Western Europe for quite some time.

It is a plain fact, however, that the work to improve the quality of the healthcare system in this part of Ireland isn’t complete, as despite our best efforts we still don’t have adequate facilities to train the numbers of nurses and medical staff that wish to learn the profession, and as a result many find themselves going to England and that itself leads to a rather unfortunate brain drain which harms service provision here, the solution is quite simple and it is simply working to increase the number of nursing placements here in Northern Ireland, and this is a policy that Sinn Fein will spearhead in the next term.

Just a few days ago I spoke to someone that told me how difficult they found it to find someplace to live, such a predicament is sadly becoming increasingly common, especially with sharp increases in rent. If we are to improve this situation then we need multi-levelled approach, firstly we need to increase the supply of houses to make it easier for first-time buyers, secondly we need to restrict how much landlords can increase rent per year and thirdly we need to give tenants the right to first purchase on homes they are currently renting.

All of these policies combined will make it easier for people to make that first step onto the housing ladder while giving those still renting an easier time to make ends meet and extra confidence heading into the future.

I know realbassist, so I can say with certainty that they’ll be an incredibly passionate and dedicated member of the Assembly, something which you’ve probably seen if you’ve kept attention to their campaign so far. If we are going to continue to fight for improvements to our healthcare and housing system then the Assembly needs committed Sinn Fein representatives like realbassist, so on election day go out and vote Sinn Fein for a better tomorrow, thank you.”