Daughter of man murdered by IRA: Make Sinn Fein pay for victims’ pensions

In an article to mark the campaign by the News Letter and Ulster Human Rights Watch (UHRW) calling for the implementation of the Victims’ Payment Scheme, campaigner Mary McCurrie rejected the idea of awarding pensions to former terrorists who murdered and maimed innocent people.

She said: “You just don’t wake up in the morning and say ‘I’m going to the local corner shop to buy a gun and I’m going to shoot X, Y and Z because I disagree with them.’

“You pre-plan this. You think about it. You go and look at what you are going to do beforehand. You cannot do that and then call yourself a victim. You are a perpetrator and you do not deserve one brown penny.”

At the weekend, Ms McCurrie and her family attended a religious service on the Lower Newtownards Road to mark the 50th anniversary of her father Jimmy’s murder.

She says her ‘war’ is against Sinn Fein-IRA and they should be held accountable for what they did.

She added: “The ones who don’t deserve the pension are the ones who are gurning the most, and that is Sinn Fein-IRA.

“Everything that they carried out has made Sinn Fein the richest political party in Europe. If anybody should be paying these pensions, litigation should be brought to the door of Sinn Fein and they should be paying the pensions.

“My own particular war is against Sinn Fein-IRA because they’re the ones that handed me and my family victimhood at the end of a barrel of a gun.

“I don’t call myself a victim. My family are not victims. We are survivors of that terrorism and all innocent survivors of that brand of terrorism should be compensated. I personally want Sinn Fein to pay for it.”

Mary was 19 at the time of her father’s murder. She had three siblings and her mother, Kathleen, was three months pregnant with a fifth child.

A fierce critic of republicanism, she said it’s time for politicians to become more vocal in the debate over who should qualify for payments.