SINN FÉIN president Gerry Adams has accused dissident republican groups of engaging in futile “old-fashioned physical forcism” and suggested they recently murdered two British soldiers and a PSNI officer “almost because it could be done”.
Ahead of a meeting in Navan today with party members from all over Ireland to try to plan a course that would see an improvement in party fortunes in the Republic, Mr Adams took time to turn his scorn on the dissidents.
He said the Real IRA, who murdered British soldiers Patrick Azimkar and Mark Quinsey in Antrim, and the Continuity IRA, who murdered PSNI officer Stephen Carroll in Craigavon in March, may have been motivated by nothing more than “vanity”.
“You get these two soldiers killed, but for what reason? You get the police officer killed, for what reason? Almost because it could be done. Did anybody come forward? Did anyone stand up and make themselves available to rationalise or argue about what they did? I think that’s wrong,” he said.
“Say what you want about Sinn Féin but we stood toe to toe with anyone when we thought it was the right thing to do, for those who wanted to, to engage in armed actions. When we thought there was another way of doing it we also went in and argued and debated it out,” he added.
Mr Adams said he would have no difficulty with dissidents who would organise politically. “But I have no time at all for those who are just going to put young guys in prison for no good reason, or put people in graves for no good reason.”
Mr Adams, the Sinn Féin leadership and party activists are gathering in Navan, Co Meath, today to plan how to recover from recent electoral reverses in the South and also to decide on its approach to the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in October.
Mr Adams indicated that the party is almost certainly going to campaign against the treaty.
Mr Adams and the leadership have been stung by recent resignations of Sinn Féin politicians such as Christy Burke and Louise Minihan in Dublin and also by criticism made by unsuccessful European Sinn Féin candidate Toireasa Ferris in Munster.
The loss of Mary Lou McDonald’s European seat in Dublin was also a blow to the party, while in the general election Sinn Féin saw its representation in the Dáil drop from five to four seats.
Ms Ferris, daughter of Kerry Sinn Féin TD Martin Ferris, implicitly raised questions about the Northern focus of the party and how this appeared to be an electoral turnoff to voters in the South. “Too many voters unfortunately see us as a Northern-based party,” she wrote last month in the republican newspaper An Phoblacht.
Her comments prompted a number of commentators to suggest that now was time for Mr Adams to consider resigning. In an interview with The Irish Times, however, he insisted that he had no intention of standing down. “There is work to be done and I intend to do it,” he said. “I don’t see us as being at a crossroads. We are on a relatively long haul in terms of building political strength across the island.”
Mr Adams said today’s meeting will “review the current situation, assess our strategic, political and organisational progress and then set out a programme of work for the coming months”. The Sinn Féin president, who will be 61 in October, said he was confident Sinn Féin would continue to make political progress in the South: “There’s nobody for giving up, there’s nobody for surrendering the ground we have won.”