Under the byline 'Squinter' the paper criticised Mr Adams' record as MP for West Belfast in the wake of the murder of Frank 'Bap' McGreevy.

The former republican prisoner died after being savagely beaten in his own home over the St Patrick's Day weekend.

The column claimed Mr Adams had to shoulder his share of the blame for Mr McGreevy's death and that of grenngrocer Harry holland last year, because as MP he hadn't done enough to counter the culture of violence and anti-social behaviour in the area.

North Down DUP MLA Peter Weir claims that the paper's u-turn confirms the one-sided and the one-sided and party political nature of the paper.
He said in the past he and others have objected to government and European funds being given to the newspaper and is now calling for ban on funding to be imposed.

Mr Weir said: "A newspaper issuing a front-page apology to someone is an extremely rare occurrence.

"The only examples in recent times that I can think of is when The Sun was forced to apologise for falsely claiming that the people caught up in the Hillsborough football disaster had attacked the police and picked victims pockets – an allegation that was utterly baseless and false.

"It is usually only for errors of that magnitude that a front-page apology is forthcoming.

"More recently the parents of Madeleine McCann received front page apologies from the Express Group, only after admitting more than 100 stories about the family were untrue.

"In this context it is truly bizarre to learn that this weeks edition of the Andersonstown News carries a front page apology to Gerry Adams – not for libeling or slandering him, but because one of its columnists dared to pen an article critical of the Sinn Fein leader and his performance as the Member of Parliament for West Belfast over the last 20 or so years."

No-one from the Andersonstown News was available for comment.

He said the front page apology was unprecedented: "Never, in all my time in politics, have I heard of a newspaper apologise to a politician because one of its opinion writers was critical of them. "This raises serious questions about just how free a press the Andersonstown News really operates.

"Is it a newspaper in the sense understood throughout the rest of the world or is it merely a Sinn Fein propaganda sheet?

"This latest episode will leave many people to draw the conclusion that it is very much the latter.

"The truth of the matter is that whilst the Andersonstown News continues this slavish devotion to a single political party it should not be receiving one penny of public money, either from the government or through various European funding programmes as it has in the past."

Mr Weir compared the Andersonstown News to the Soviet-era newspapers that were under the control of the Communist Party.

"By groveling to Adams in this way, the Andersonstown News has confirmed what many people already believed, that it is the Sinn Fein equivalent of Pravda," he said.