Teebane bombing: IRA bomb killed six civilian workmen - campaigner calls for 'end to manipulation of the truth'

He was speaking ahead of the anniversary of the Teebane Massacre by the IRA, when the terror group killed eight Protestant workmen and injured six more at Teebane with a 500lb roadside bomb on January 17, 1992.

Mr Donaldson notes that the UFF used Teebane to justify murdering five people at Sean Graham's Bookmakers on the Ormeau Road in Belfast just over two weeks later - but says this "context" is never mentioned in public discourse.

By contrast, he says it has become normal to "contextualise" IRA attacks such as the Kingsmills Massacre, in which the IRA killed ten Protestant workmen in south Armagh.

"The preceding murders of the Reaveys and O’Dowds are now regularly referenced to 'contextualise' or even in some sense part-justify Kingsmills in the general public narrative - that it was inevitable, that there was 'no alternative',” he said.

“This doesn’t appear so for other atrocities. What media coverage or public discourse ever 'contextualises' Bloody Sunday through the prism of two RUC GC police officers being murdered in the city three days earlier or the most senior army officer up to that point dying on the morning of Bloody Sunday, having been shot in Londonderry four months earlier?

The two RUC officers, Peter Gilgunn and David Montgomery, were ambushed on Creggan Hill - close to the scene of Bloody Sunday three days later.

On the day of Bloody Sunday, Major Robin Nigel Alers-Hankey of the Royal Green Jackets died from IRA gunshot injuries sustained in the city centre while trying to protect firemen from stone throwers.

He died four months after being shot - the same day 13 people were killed when members of the Parachute Regiment opened fire on crowds following a civil rights demonstration in the city.

Mr Donaldson said the shooting of the RUC and army officers "are not justification or the cause for what happened on that day - but they are nevertheless heinous acts of terrorism which should be covered and condemned by all".

Two similar cases, he said, are the eight murders at Teebane and the murders of five Catholic civilians at the Ormeau Road bookmakers a little over two weeks later - which he noted the UFF claimed was retaliation for Teebane. But when has the media and wider public discourse ever mentioned this self-serving justification by the UFF for the Ormeau Road murders? It hasn’t - and rightly so."

He added: “It is high time that people started behaving honourably around all of these issues - and stopped the manipulation of the truth."

The eight men who died at Teebane were David Samuel Harkness, William Gary A Bleeks, John Robert Dunseith, John Richard McConnell, Cecil James Caldwell, Nigel William J McKee, Robert Irons and Oswald Wilson Gilchrist.

In response, Daniel Holder of the Committee for the Administration of Justice said that he personally rejects the legitimacy of tit-for-tat “framing” on Troubles murders.

"There was a particular framing at various times of the conflict that killings were ‘tit for tat’, this was quite often a false framing, and regardless more murders can of course never be justified by the suggestion they are in retaliation for others,” he said.

“Any suggestion that Army massacres such as Bloody Sunday were in retaliation or to be contextualised by past IRA attacks would imply an equivalence between the Army and paramilitary groups.

"It would imply that security force killings were not in legitimate self defence in the face of gunfire or the real imminent danger of it, but rather were unlawful retaliatory killings.”

The annual public Teebane commemoration them takes place at 3pm on Sunday at Teebane crossroads on the Cookstown to Omagh Road.