SINN Fein’s Michelle Gildernew has said taking her seat in Westminster or voting in debates would be “irrelevant”.

The Fermanagh-south Tyrone MP announced on Monday night her desire to retain the seat once held by hunger striker Bobby Sands - for a fourth time.

On the topic of Sinn Fein’s position not to take their seats at Westminster, Ms. Gildernew refuted the suggestion that she should participate in votes and debates whether that’s now or next year – if she gets re-elected.

“If I need to raise points wherever and I will articulate their point of view in whatever forum is appropriate, very rarely that forum is Westminster,” she said in an interview with The Impartial Reporter.

It is against this backdrop that the Ulster Unionist Party proposed a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party last week to form a pact between the two to oust Sinn Fein from Westminster. Unionists claim that Ms. Gildernew’s stance means she does not represent the people of Fermanagh-south Tyrone, an accusation she denies.

When challenged on the criticisms of some unionists, Ms. Gildernew said: “I don’t accept that.” “We have seen that sometimes people who go to Westminster and take their seat don’t participate very heavily either. They know that so much of the work in London is irrelevant to the people of this constituency. We have to go to the Assembly, we have got the committees, the work has to be done here. It’s about working for the people; I can represent them in Dublin, in London, in Belfast in any department.” Refusing to take her seat is the Sinn Fein position and that’s something that Ms. Gildernew can’t see changing.

“I can’t see it changing because so much of the stuff in Westminster is England and Wales and I don’t feel that I should have a say over the people in England and Wales equally I don’t think people in England have a right to have a say on matters here.

“I worked in London, I worked in Westminster before I was elected to the Assembly and I saw how little of it had an impact. In the past 15 years there have maybe been three votes that you might have wanted to be there. Hundreds of votes, thousands of votes, have been pretty irreverent,” she said.

Reacting specifically to the UUP proposal for a pact with the DUP, Ms. Gildernew said Mike Nesbitt’s party are “being very dismissive of the intelligence of the voters”.

“They think by packaging together a deal and putting up a candidate that people will vote for them on the basis of religion. I think they are being not only complacent but insulting to people to ask them to vote for them on that basis.

“I think people have seen through that very shallow, one dimensional, sectarian idea and they have rejected it. It’s very insulting and demeaning to the unionist electorate if unionist parties think they can cobble something together and that will work.

“Arlene Foster probably summed it up best when she was in the studio during the last election and the first or second count came back and I had been beaten. Arlene’s reaction was a punch in the air, ‘you have no idea how important this is to unionists – we’ve won Fermanagh-south Tyrone back’.

“It’s not that they want to oust me. This seat is very significant because this is the seat that Bobby Sands won in 1981 so I don’t take it personally – they want the seat and that is why they threw everything at the election the last time and you had all shades of unionism coming together.

“There is a desire to see this seat back in unionist hands but as much as it means to unionism it means more to us and we’ll be doing everything we can to retain the seat,” she said.

Back in July, Mrs. Foster, a DUP MLA and Stormont Minister, told this newspaper that Ms. Gildernew “has been invisible for four years and now all of a sudden she is becoming visible again”.

“Arlene is entitled to her opinion and she can think what she likes,” responded Ms. Gildernew.

“My electorate will know that I work very hard on issues that aren’t necessary big publicity issues and when they contact me on the Twelfth of July, at the weekend or at Christmas that I am accessible and they are able to talk to me. I would say there are people who were very offended by Arlene’s comment but I wouldn’t get too upset about Arlene. It’s an election year and I am sure she will say worse than that,” she said.

Ms. Gildernew described being selected to run for Westminster again as “really very humbling”.

“It’s a massive honour to be asked by your peers to run in a Westminster election. You realise that people are putting faith in you, that you have to work very hard for those people. We have a lot of issues in this constituency and people want to see somebody who is very active, working on their behalf and there on the ground working for them all the time.

“The past four years have been extremely difficult for a lot of people. We have seen a lot of challenges both economically and socially. The backdrop of this election is going to be Tory cuts – no question about it. There are families who are working two jobs, who are paying a mortgage, who can’t decide whether to buy groceries or put oil in the tank,” she said.