Ex-UUP leader and UDR man Tom Elliott asks how IRA can be seen as 'great warriors' for shooting down lone men on isolated country roads

Mr Elliott was speaking ahead of a commemoration organised by local Sinn Fein members in Dromore, Co Tyrone, on Saturday.

Mr Elliott hails from nearby Ballinamallard and served in the UDR from 1982 to 1999 in an area including Dromore.

"I’ve said all along that people have a right to commemorate their families and friends who have died,” he said.

"But to have public commemorations for terrorists is way beyond what should be expected of the unionist people to comprehend.”

He said those who died on the hunger strikes “had a choice” – but that those whom they and their comrades killed had no such choice.

The IRA “deliberately murdered husbands, fathers, sons, daughters, in cold blood, without any warning,” he said.

"Many of those were sectarian killings, just because of their religion, so there’s a great concern in the unionist community that people in their midst and people who are round and about them are commemorating these type of people.”

He gave the example of Robert Jameson, a 22-year-old mechanic and UDR man, killed in nearby Trillick in 1974.

"They waited ‘til the bus dropped him off on a country road, pulled up then, and shot him,” said Mr Elliott. "What’s the great warrior thing about that? Shooting someone who’s a fellow countryman, and probably a neighbour?”

It comes after a furore surrounding a similar SF commemoration last Sunday in south Armagh.

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