Any attempts by Sinn Fein leaders to sanitise the murders and criminality of the Provisional IRA must be rejected, a number of terror victims have said

During a weekend radio interview, Ms McDonald was asked about the conviction of former Sinn Fein councillor Jonathan Dowdall for his role in a gangland murder at the Regency Hotel in Dublin in 2016.

Speaking to the Newstalk programme, Ms McDonald said that Mr Dowdall and members of the Provisional IRA were not comparable.

“The things that happened in the course of a very long political conflict – which, thank God, is now long over. We’ve had 25 years of peace – there is no comparison between that and the kind of challenge, and it is an ongoing challenge, to our society between this and the so-called gangland crime epidemic poses.”

Reacting to the comments, the widow of an Irish police officer Jerry McCabe, who shot dead by PIRA during an attempted robbery in 1996, said “murder is murder”.

Ann McCabe said: “There is no difference between the criminal and Sinn Fein/IRA who murdered my husband. My husband wasn’t part of the Troubles at all, he had nothing to do with them, he was escorting money as was his partner Ben O’Sullivan, who has sadly died since,” she told the BBC’s Nolan Show.

“My view will never change, murder is murder, and the IRA were up to their eyes in murder and carnage.”

Mrs McCabe added: “They were not soldiers (the IRA), they were murderers, robbing the pensions of older people, that’s what they did.”

Ann Travers, whose sister Mary was murdered by the IRA in 1984, also said she was disturbed by the Sinn Fein leader’s comments. Ms Travers’ magistrate father was also seriously wounded in the gun attack on her family as they left Sunday mass in south Belfast.

"My dad was a resident magistrate, a Catholic, and he chose to be on the judiciary to be on the side of law and order, but because the IRA didn’t want to follow proper law and order – they wanted to be judge, jury and executioner – they attempted to kill him and succeeded in killing Mary. So I can’t see any difference in murder,” she said.

Ms Travers said that some recent comments from Sinn Fein leaders would help the current dissident republican groups feel “fully justified” in carrying out terrorist attacks – including the murder of her friend Lyra McKee in 2019.

"And I really think that [Sinn Fein deputy leader] Michelle O’Neill, by saying ‘there was no alternative,’ has done huge harm. She has set things back,” Mrs Travers said.

The Innocent Victims United umbrella group has invited Ms McDonald to join them “in calling for justice for innocent victims of terrorism yet to receive it, including those impacted by Provisional IRA terrorism”.

IVU spokesman Kenny Donaldson said: “And no doubt you will also proactively encourage those to come forward who are linked to and/or are aware of crime having been committed over the period of ‘The Troubles.’ We await your interpretation of crime. Is it what most of us understand it to be or is only crime if not provided for within the IRA green book?”

Among a number of political figures also concerned at Ms McDonald’s claims, UUP leader Doug Beattie said the “whitewashing of the IRA’s part in the butchering of men, women and children… is appalling”.

“Mary Lou McDonald is deluded if she thinks that IRA atrocities such as the Abercorn, Claudy, La Mon or Enniskillen were not crimes. The shooting of Angela Gallagher, Jean McConville and Mary Travers - to name but a few - are crimes that would shame the devil, but not it would seem Sinn Fein.

"Gun attacks by drug gangs are no different to gun attacks by the IRA, because both are the work of illegal criminal gangs.”

TUV East Antrim spokesman, Norman Boyd, said: “Mrs McDonald’s comments were not just insulting to the countless victims of IRA violence; they are manifestly wrong in point of fact. Gangland crime was exactly the sort of thing her fellow travellers in the Republican movement specialised in”.

Sinn Fein have been contacted for comment