Majority of Irish army soldiers served with honour and valour: Victims' group

The Lisnaskea-based South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF), which provides support to innocent victims/survivors of terrorism, hit back at comments made by Cork County councillor Kieran McCarthy in an interview with the News Letter yesterday.

SEFF spokesman Kenny Donaldson said Mr McCarthy’s claim that many Irish Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers took a similar path to him and joined the IRA does a disservice to the many IDF personnel who “served with honour and valour”.

Mr McCarthy, who served time in prison in the early 1990s after being caught with weapons in Belgium, said he “cooperated” with the IRA during his time as an army private, and after completing his three years of service joined the terrorist organisation during the hunger strikes in 1981.

“Going from my own experience and those around me in the Irish army at the time I think a lot of people felt the same way I did. Probably not everyone would have done something about it, but I would suspect quite a few did,” he said.

Responding to his claims, Mr Donaldson, whose organisation represents a number of Irish Defence Forces families based in the Republic of Ireland, said: “Mr McCarthy suggested that he and other IDF colleagues were essentially roughed up in south Armagh by members of the British Army and that this led to him then joining the ranks of the Provisional IRA. This is self-serving justification for the choices he took.

“With Mr McCarthy there is no question of a chicken and egg conundrum – his first salute was to the Provisional IRA whom he himself acknowledges he was collaborating with over the period of his service in the IDF.”

He added: “We have often stated that there were undoubtedly infiltrators and collaborators operating within the IDF and also the Garda Siochonna, but its airing requires recognising that there existed a majority who served with honour and valour – who stood against insurrectionists like Mr McCarthy.”

Mr McCarthy, who served as a Sinn Fein representative for more than 20 years before quitting the party in 2015 following “a dispute”, says he got fully behind the emerging peace process in the 1990s and has stressed that he is now “fully supportive of the peace process and the Belfast Agreement”.

He joined the Irish army in the mid-1970s and was posted to patrol the border.

He says he began to sympathise with the IRA after an incident in south Armagh in 1976 during which he claims he and his colleagues were humiliated at gunpoint by a British Army patrol.

He is now an independent councillor in Co Cork.

The 58-year-old runs a walking tours business in his home town of Cobh.

Describing himself as a keen historian, Mr McCarthy believes it is important that people from all sides of the conflict record their stories of the Troubles.