Mr Martin McGuinness has insisted that he had done nothing that he was ashamed of
during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, though he conceded that the IRA had "done things in the past that were wrong".
|
In an interview with BBC News24's
One To One
being broadcast today, Mr McGuinness recalled his part in the events of Bloody Sunday, when he has admitted he was second in command of the IRA in Derry.
He said that nationalist areas of the city such as the Bogside, where the Bloody Sunday shootings took place, were "effectively at war with the British state".
But he insisted that "no evidence" has been produced that he was armed on January 30th, 1972, or that the IRA fired the first shot on that day, when 13 demonstrators in a civil rights march were shot dead by British troops.
The Sinn Féin MP - now Northern Ireland's education minister - said: "The only role I played on the day of Bloody Sunday was to go to the march and to share in the sadness and the sorrow.
"I was just like any of the other young people within the city - and remember at that time the City of Derry, and the nationalist republican areas of the city, like the Bogside and the Creggan and the Brandywell were effectively at war with the British state."
Mr McGuinness said that claims that he had directed or precipitated violence on the day were part of an effort to divert attention away from the killing of innocent marchers.
The authorities had initially attempted to smear those killed by describing them as "gunmen and bombers", he said.
"Everybody knows that every single person shot on that day was an innocent marcher, so they now move to Plan B, and Plan B is, if you can't blame the people who were killed on that day, try to blame Martin McGuinness," he said.
"I don't think that's going to work."
The "big difference" between the Bloody Sunday killings and killings by the IRA, he said, was that "in instances where the IRA killed civilians, the IRA didn't set out to blacken the name of those civilians.
"The difference is, on Bloody Sunday, that the British state, the British military forces, set out to blacken the names of the people who were murdered."
Mr McGuinness is due to give evidence shortly to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, though he said he was "doubtful" of its ability to establish the truth about what happened that day.
He said: "I'm not running away from the past. I'm going to the Bloody Sunday Tribunal and I am prepared to face up to whatever process eventually may or may not flow from that, vis-a-vis the whole issue of reconciliation and truth."
He added: "The IRA have done things in the past which were wrong, and I have spoken up on countless occasions about that and so has Gerry Adams.
"But I haven't done anything that I am ashamed of.
"The reality is that many wrong things have happened over the years and many different participants have been responsible for that. As is the case in any war situation ...
"We can either dwell on that and continue this process _as the rejectionists tried to do, of using the past to undermine the future, or we can focus ourselves on, not forgetting what happened in the past, but recognising that building the new future is the key objective, and that's what I want to be part of."
PA