them into the democratic process and political solutions instead of violent ones. Sinn Féin won 29% of the first-preference votes in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election, the highest share of any party. With 27 out of 90 seats, they became the largest party in Stormont for the first time ever. "Today ushers in a new era", O'Neill said shortly before the final results were announced. "Irrespective of religious, political or social backgrounds, my commitment is to make politics work." Past links with Republican paramilitaries Sinn Féin is the largest Irish republican political party, and was historically associated with the IRA, while also having been associated with the Provisional IRA in the party's modern incarnation. The Irish government alleged that senior members of Sinn Féin have held posts on the IRA Army Council. However, the SF leadership has denied these claims. A republican document of the early 1980s stated: "Both Sinn Féin and the IRA play different but converging roles in the war of national liberation. The Irish Republican Army wages an armed campaign... Sinn Féin maintains the propaganda war and is the public and political voice of the movement". Robert White states at that time Sinn Féin was the junior partner in the relationship with the IRA, and they were separate organisations despite there being some overlapping membership. The British government stated in 2005 that "we had always said all the way through we believed that Sinn Féin and the IRA were inextricably linked and that had obvious implications at leadership level". The Northern Bank robbery of £26.5 million in Belfast in December 2004 further delayed a political deal in Northern Ireland. The IRA were widely blamed for the robbery although Sinn Féin denied this and stated that party officials had not known of the robbery nor sanctioned it. Because of the timing of the robbery, it is considered that the plans for the robbery must have been laid whilst Sinn Féin was engaged in talks about a possible peace settlement. This undermined confidence among unionists about the sincerity of republicans towards reaching agreement. In the aftermath of the row over the robbery, a further controversy erupted when, on RTÉ's Questions and Answers programme, the chairman of Sinn Féin, Mitchel McLaughlin, insisted that the IRA's controversial killing of a mother of ten young children, Jean McConville, in the early 1970s though "wrong", was not a crime, as it had