Irresponsible security claims about the UK could radicalise youth

The 1974 UVF bombings were sectarian massacres in which 33 civilians were murdered.

Mr O’Dowd, a Sinn Fein MLA for Upper Bann, made his claim on the Nolan Show on Radio Ulster, when he had been asked if he condemned the IRA bomb in Manchester in 1996.

The remarks come amid a proliferation of allegations about collusion and British culpability in loyalist terrorism.

Such claims, even if they are not verified, besmirch the record of the UK authorities during the Troubles and so help republicans to win the propaganda war.

Nonsense is not only peddled with regard to loyalist attacks, a similar tactic is being deployed regarding IRA terror.

There have been claims that the authorities knew about the Shankill bomb and a similar allegation is hovering in the background at Kingsmills and Teebane.

This is a transparent effort to spread the blame even for the IRA’s most deplorable crimes. It will almost certainly be made in other republican atrocities in the coming years.

While the Irish government has never been so crass as to suggest that Britain bombed Dublin and Monaghan, Charlie Flanagan’s recent call on the UK government to release files on the case did give succour to the conspiracy theorists who will assume that Britain has something to hide.

Mr O’Dowd has form in outlandish claims that seek to implicate the British state in republican terrorism.

In 2015, after dissidents tried to murder PSNI officers in Lurgan, he said the attack was “a product of MI5 and war junkies working together”.

That allegation was, like the Dublin-Monaghan comments, highly irresponsible. It is the sort of talk that could influence and radicalise impressionable young people.