Erstwhile leader of the UK's 500,000 nurses declines to say if it was wrong for the IRA to blow people up and shoot them after revealing she is standing for Sinn Fein

The News Letter posed the question to her, but no response has been forthcoming.

It followed her decision to step down from her role as effectively the UK's top nursing figure this week to fight the coming general election as a candidate in Fermanagh and South Tyrone for Sinn Fein, historically viewed as the political wing of the IRA.

Ms Cullen – who has an honourary professorship from Queen's University Belfast – qualified as a nurse in 1985 and was head of the RCN in Northern Ireland in 2016, before becoming UK head in 2019: effectively making her the union leader of the UK's half-a-million nurses.

Despite phone calls, voicemails, texts, Twitter messages and emails, seeking an answer to the above question over more than 24 hours, there has been no response either from Prof Cullen directly or the party press office.

• MEDICS PICKING UP PIECES… AND IN FIRING LINE:

Northern Ireland’s medical personnel bore witness to most of the violence of the Troubles, being left to repair people's broken bodies in the aftermath of attacks – but were sometimes targets too.

It is hard to know how many nurses were killed by the IRA, but here are just three examples:

Marie Wilson, a 20-year-old Protestant, killed by the time bomb left at Enniskillen war memorial in 1987;

John Griffiths, a 37-year-old Protestant who worked as a prison nurse, killed by a booby-trap bomb attached to his car outside his home in Loughgall in 1989;

And Caroline Moreland, a 34-year-old Catholic shot dead in rural Fermanagh, suspected of passing information to police.

In addition the IRA bombed Musgrave Park Hospital in south Belfast in 1991. The blast, targeting the army wing, killed two British soldiers and wounded nine other soldiers, a five-year-old girl, and a four-month-old baby.

Infamously, the IRA also shot up the Royal Victoria Hospital in an effort to kill Nigel Dodds, who was visiting his six-year-old son in the intensive care ward in 1996.

Loyalists also murdered medical personnel too of course, and carried out attacks within hospital grounds.

In addition, there were cases of IRA members in the nursing service too.

For example, Geraldine Ferrity, a nurse in Tyrone, served eight years of a life sentence for blowing up a part-time member of the UDR (Albert Cooper) with a booby-trap car bomb in 1990; the "officer commanding" of female IRA members in the Maze, she was released in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement.

• ‘KILLERS VENERATED AS PATRIOTS’

Among those raising the contrast between nursing and the IRA in the last few days has been Ian Acheson, the former senior prison officer and counter-extremism academic (@NotThatBigIan, 14,000 Twitter followers).

He said: "The question of her personal morality on the terrorist killings and killers her party still venerates as 'patriots' is highly valid... It's a perfectly legitimate question to ask. And highly inconvenient."

Another voice making a similar point online was @drokane (4,900 Twitter followers) who said: "You'd think a mental health nurse in west belfast would have seen and heard the suffering that SF/IRA inflicted on the locals. They certainly told me."

Prior to the news that she is to stand for Sinn Fein on Tuesday, there had been little open sign of her political leanings on social media during her stint in the RCN.

When King Charles became patron of the RCN last year, she had issued a statement saying: “This is such fantastic news for our members and for the college. We are deeply grateful to His Majesty for demonstrating his support and appreciation for the nursing profession by continuing our long connection with the royal family."

However she had reportedly told an event in 2023 that "I believe the only hope for the NHS is reunification" of Ireland.

Late on Thursday evening, she had released a statement officially confirming she will be the Sinn Fein candidate and saying: "As a nurse and a union leader, I have witnessed first hand the Tories’ total disregard and disdain for hardworking, ordinary people.

"This election is your opportunity to send a clear message about what you want for the future."