Newspaper interview with Sinn Fein president shows why republicans cannot be trusted

Mary Lou McDonald’s interview as reported in the Sunday Independent on May 24 was nauseating.
Letter to the editorLetter to the editor
Letter to the editor

The Nazi element aside (she said Sean Russell was not a collaborator), I believe that she has in effect given the current batch of IRA terrorists (strategically called ‘dissidents’) a boost because they will no doubt take it that if the ‘campaign’ was justified, back before they were politically sidelined by their brothers in arms, mainstream republicans, then it so remains.

Surely also the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was built upon the understanding that Sinn Fein and the IRA had eventually realised that the republican assault on Ireland and decades of barbarism was not in fact justified?

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Isn’t that what Sinn Fein now (at least at face value) preach to the dissidents when they commit murder, for example?

Is Ms McDonald also conversely saying that others were justified in their terrorist campaigns too or is it only Irish republicanism that is permitted to hold all the claims to righteousness?

Despite later appearing to clarify her Sunday Independent interview and saying she would not justify every IRA action, I believe that Ms McDonald has affirmed for us that the GFA was built upon a farce.

As many other events involving the Shinners and the Provos glorifying past terrorism have borne out, the people of this island were hoodwinked into believing otherwise.

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By so reassuring the republican movement that Sinn Fein was and remains justified in their teachings of twisted ideologies and propaganda etc, all of which led many a young man and woman either into going to jail or to an early grave (along with their Protestant and often Catholic neighbours), Ms McDonald has just confirmed unionists’ beliefs that they can never be trusted.

As far as I am concerned therefore, anyone who lays claim to any shred of decency should never be amenable to any form of united Ireland at Sinn Fein and the IRA’s devious and perilous behest.

Archibald Toner, Dromore, Co Down