Omagh shooting: Similar justifications for violence by Sinn Fein and New IRA creates paramilitary ‘legends and heroes’ which maintain divisions and friction, it is claimed.

Political commentator Alex Kane was speaking only days after dissident republicans gunned down off-duty DCI John Caldwell at an Omagh sports complex. A wide range of Sinn Fein leaders have unequivocally condemned the attack in the strongest language.

However, asked if Sinn Fein's ongoing defence of Provisional IRA violence has helped provide an atmosphere where violent groups are still given support in nationalist communities, Mr Kane responded that both loyalists and republicans had been allowed off the hook with regards their murders - and this is helping maintain ‘simmering frictions’ evident from before 1998.

The IRA murdered 273 police officers during the Troubles. Republicans killed 2158 people in total while loyalists killed 1099.

Mr Kane said: "When Michelle O'Neill told Mark Carruthers last August that, in terms of the IRA campaign, '...there was no alternative...' to past actions, she was sending a very clear message."

However, he said, there was a clear alternative to violence: negotiation.

This was proven very clearly by the SDLP and NI Civil Rights Association, he argued.

If you contrast the campaigns of the SDLP and of Sinn Fein and the IRA between 1970 and 19980 the balance sheet weighs "very heavily" in the SDLP's favour.

"It was the efforts of the SDLP which delivered huge socio/political changes in NI: not the terrorism of the IRA. So, there clearly was an alternative."

He added: "As in the case of the murderous attack on DCI Caldwell last week by the New IRA, that organisation would argue that it too has ‘no alternative’ to opposing any form of British rule anywhere in Ireland. That’s the brutal reality of the ‘no alternative’ defence and justification of past actions."

Would anyone in Sinn Fein, I wonder, argue that there was "no alternative" to loyalist paramilitarism, he asks?

Once the "no alternative" argument gains traction it can be used by any paramilitary group—old or new. And this leads to a situation where many people still shrug their shoulders and admit, "albeit softly" that they can understand why there was violence.

Loyalists and republicans will "always have different narratives" of why the Troubles happened and simply "sweep everything under a carpet and move on".

"But dismissing rather than trying to explain the past is fraught with danger. To paraphrase the key line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 'If you dismiss the past it becomes legend and that legend will become the truth which seeps into the history books'.

"And when the legend becomes the truth it allows paramilitaries on both sides off the hook, because they will never have to give an account of the reasons underpinning the choices they made. They then become heroes in the eyes of far too many people on their own side who have swallowed the legend hook, line and sinker."

He added: "All of which explains why the post-1998 NI is, in terms of polarity and simmering friction, pretty much the same as the pre-1998 NI."

Sinn Fein was invited to comment.