'Bobby Sands was a pawn - and a pawn for an unjustifiable cause': Retired Belfast lecturer reacts to Glasgow rector's speech honouring IRA man

​Dermot Nesbitt made the comments after the new rector of the University of Glasgow quoted approvingly from the IRA man during his inaugural address – something Prof Nesbitt says was “inappropriate”.

Prof Nesbitt, a former UUP MLA, used to lecture at Queen's University Belfast's accountancy and finance department. He was stood next to his friend Edgar Graham (a fellow QUB academic) when the IRA shot him dead on campus in 1983.

He was responding to remarks by Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Kuwaiti-born plastic surgeon, who was last week appointed the University of Glasgow’s new rector.

A rector “is elected by the registered students of the university, and the main role of the rector is to represent the university’s students,” says the university.

He ended his inaugural speech by saying: “In the words of the immortal Bobby Sands, ‘our revenge will be the laughter of our children’.”

Sands was a member of the Provisional IRA who was jailed after blowing up a furniture showroom and opening fire on a police patrol in Belfast, and killed himself on hunger strike in 1981.

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Prof Nesbitt said of Sands that “he conjures up in my mind someone who became a pawn for a cause – that his life was made sacrificial for an unjustifiable cause” and that Dr Abu Sittah should have avoided such a “politically-sensitive” remark.

The university itself said of the speech that “his comments are not those of the university and we strongly rebut them”.