of mice and murderers

Tea with Teresa Hattershall in her plushly appointed home.
She's an activist for the Fine Gael political party who are currently governing Ireland in coalition with the Labour Party.
My opening gambit: "Teresa are the IRA and Sinn Fein infiltrating community groups?"
She says: "Oh they're very good at it."
I say: "But you all do it, right?"
She says: "Well I don't think that's true. If we join a group everyone knows who we are. And we're unlikely to use what we learn to kill anyone."
I say: "Are you really so different from them?"
She says: "James, I heard recently that Sinn Fein offered a man twenty thousand Euro to join groups and spy for them. That's the thing. He's known to be a decent man. He's known to have no time for the IRA. And he's very active in community work. So they wait until he falls on hard times and that's when they move in."
I say: "But why pay him twenty grand? Why not just join themselves?"
She says: "They don't want people to know they're being spied on by Sinn Fein and the IRA at a community meeting. And you know they don't have that many members anyway. Even when people vote for them they don't really want to join them."
I say: "I've been aware of it for a while. Up in Louth the IRA had a cop killer on the community group that was calling for more cops to be assigned to the area. By the way I don't happen to think you're all the same. I only said that for arguments sake. But up until recently I was telling people they should punish you guys for legalising abortion and not let you stampede them away from Sinn Fein."
She says: "What changed?"
I say: "I became aware of the IRA functioning as a full time international drug dealing people trafficking mafia, mentoring gangs in towns and villages all over Ireland. Since Sinn Fein are the IRA's proxies in parliament, I could no longer justify telling people to vote for them. But I think they're going to win the next election without my endorsement. You guys are in awful trouble. And these are dark days for Ireland. My only hope is that I've called every election result wrong in Ireland, Britain and America for the last ten years."
She says: "We didn't legalise abortion. The people legalised it. The people vote for their representatives."
I say: "Your leader promised he wouldn't legalise abortion before the election. And then after the election he legalised it. He didn't allow us a referendum because he knew we would have rejected the killing of unborn babies."
She says: "We'll have to agree to differ on that one."