Mary Lou McDonald clarifies IRA ‘justification’ comments

The Sinn Fein president was commenting after an earlier newspaper interview when she said she might have considered joining the IRA.

Speaking on RTE radio on Friday, Ms McDonald said her interview with the Sunday Independent was not intended to cause hurt or distress to those injured or bereaved.

“I am in the very lucky position that I have never had to make that decision...at no stage have I picked up a gun or hurt another human being,” she said.

“I made the simple point that any person faced with that scenario might have become embroiled in it and might have volunteered with the IRA.”

Quoted in the Sunday Independent last weekend, Ms McDonald said of the IRA terrorism: “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it was a justified campaign.”

She also said she would have joined the IRA during the Troubles – had she been old enough.

“Yeah, I think there’d be every chance, every possibility,” she said.

During yesterday’s RTE interview, Ms McDonald said that although she did not live through the Troubles, there were whole sections of society who had no prospect of jobs and faced other hardships.

“I made the simple point that any person faced with that scenario might have become embroiled in it and might have volunteered with the IRA,” she said.

“It was justified to take on the British state...I’m not justifying every action at all and I absolutely understand the horror and pain that was visited on people”

Ms McDonald also said that when a conflict commences it becomes “almost self-sustaining and that is why it becomes difficult to stop”.

Responding to Friday’s radio interview, TUV leader Jim Allister said Ms McDonald “recognises that she needed to backtrack somewhat” on her previous comments.

“She might say now that it isn’t her role to justify anything but after endorsing Provo murders a few days ago she only has herself to blame when people ask the questions which logically follow,” he said.

“Just what about the PIRA campaign was justified? The M62 coach bombing because it resulted in the murder of nine soldiers? Were the two children – aged 2 and 5 – and their mother murdered in the same incident merely collateral?

“Were the murders of Nora Field, out shopping for her 92-year-old mother, and Irish photographer John Breslin justified because they happened to be passing Chelsea Barracks when an IRA bomb exploded?

“Was the use of Patsy Gillespie as a human bomb justified?”

Mr Allister added: “Those are just a few of the examples of how the IRA decided to ‘take on the British state,’ as Ms McDonald puts it.

“The truth is that each and every murder carried out by the PIRA was unjustified and unjustifiable.”