FIANNA FÁIL leader Micheál Martin has described as “a fiction too far” a DUP demand that the Government apologise for the alleged part a previous Fianna Fáil administration played in the creation of the Provisional IRA.
Mr Martin was responding to a motion adopted by the Northern Assembly last week calling for such an apology. During that debate, DUP Assembly member Gregory Campbell said the Fianna Fáil government in the period 1969-1970 was the “midwife at the birth of the Provo monster”.
Mr Martin said that while the Republic escaped the worst excesses of murder and sectarian violence, with some notable exceptions, that the “threat posed to the stability of this state by so-called republicans was no less severe than it was in Northern Ireland”.
“So while I would fully support any initiative aimed at getting to the truth of what was done by the IRA and to extract apologies from those who were responsible, this DUP effort to rewrite history and attempt to shift responsibility to Dublin is a fiction too far,” he wrote in yesterday’s Irish News.
Mr Martin said that the deaths of almost 1,800 men, women and children at the hands of the IRA was a “hideous crime” against their neighbours, their country and the “proud ambitions” of Irish republicanism.
“But it is not a crime for which the Irish government has culpability. If the DUP wants to point a finger of blame for the emergence and subsequent activity of the Provisional movement, it needs to look much closer to home,” he added. “It could begin by seeking to better understand the role of a Northern Ireland unionist government that actively discriminated against Catholics and then sought to crush a legitimate and peaceful civil rights movement.”
Mr Martin said it could also be appropriate for the DUP to discuss the issue with its Sinn Féin partners in the Northern Executive.
“It could demand that Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams account for his tenure on the army council of the IRA and ask him to answer the charges made by [the late IRA prisoner] Brendan Hughes regarding the abduction, murder and disappearance of Jean McConville,” he added.