IT is entirely possible to point out that Sinn Féin need to learn lessons about recent controversies involving party reps and employees and at the same time point out – in week three – that the party is held to a standard so much more rigorous than other parties that it makes the mind boggle.

By its own admission Sinn Féin needs to shake up its internal workings and that job should begin immediately as it is of the utmost importance. But the plain truth is that child protection issues have faced every other party, none of which have faced a level of questioning remotely close in terms of forensic scrutiny.

There is not a single story from the past involving protection issues that could not have been strung out for a similarly lengthy time, but wasn’t; every case throws up similar questions – if the will is there to ask them.

• Who knew?
• When did they know?
• What did they know?
• Why didn’t they know?
• Were the police informed?
• Why?
• Why not?
• Why not earlier?

And so it goes on. And on. It may well be that every other party has handled its  controversies involving reps and employees with a higher degree of professionalism and responsibility than Sinn Féin has, but we’ll never know because there’s quite simply nothing to measure it against. 

Let’s look at just two recent cases. 

DUP Councillor William Walker (61) narrowly avoided jail when he was convicted of posing online as a younger man in an attempt to get schoolchildren to send him photographs in their school  uniforms; in May he received a local government disqualification. In November, former SDLP Deputy Mayor of Derry City and Strabane James McKeever (65) lost his appeal against a four-year sentence for abusing a child in the 1980s. 

Now it may well be that the DUP and the SDLP handled these cases entirely  appropriately and diligently. It is entirely possible – perhaps even likely – that  suspensions and expulsions took place in lockstep with the emerging availability of information. But, again, we just don’t know.

And why, again, don’t we know? Because none of the countless questions with which Sinn Féin has been bombarded over the past three weeks was asked. Not one. A simple Google search reveals an utterly startling lack of curiosity on the part of currently ravenous reporters; and so we know nothing of the journey those cases took internally through their respective parties.

So where are we? Are we in a brave new world of hyper-accountability when every story involving a political party touching on child protection issues will be wrung for weeks until every last drop of information is extracted? Until every single actor is cleared or damned?

It would be good news for victims if we were, but we say with a certainty rare in politics that we are not. This admirable commitment to unsparing interrogation is as fleeting as the smoke from a Halloween banger – and just as acrid.