A Catholic priest in north Belfast has described a "punishment" attack in which two teenagers were chained to a lamp-post and tarred as "child-abuse".
The INLA claimed responsibility for the attack in Ardoyne. Fr Aidan Troy, the chairman of the board of governors of Holy Cross school, which loyalists picketed for several months, said the incident marked a low-point for the local community.
He has visited the boys - aged 14 and 15 - in their homes every day since the attack last Thursday. He said the teenagers were traumatised and one had not ventured out since.
They were taken from their homes, chained to a lamp-post at the waist and ankles, forced to remove their T-shirts and had tar, paint and oil poured over them.
"I'm not saying these boys were angels," Fr Troy said. "But I would still come out and ask any group of any hue how they can take children unilaterally from their parents and punish them like this.
You cannot take children out and pour tar over them and then send them back.
"The hospital said 'we cannot get rid of all this tar'. To me, that is absolutely horrendous." He said the community was "spiralling down into something horrendous". The mother of one of the teenagers, who did not want to be named, said she was very angry. Her son was "no angel" but tarring him was not a solution. "They gave me a guarantee it would just be a tin of paint and that it would then be over.
"I got my wee boy into the house. He was crying and I was crying and he still insisted he was being done for nothing. Parents and aunts went over and when they saw the kids chained and padlocked form the waist down, they went beserk."
Mr Terry Harkin of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the INLA's political wing, said republicans had a duty to protect working-class communities.
He claimed the INLA had acted with more "empathy" than any other republican organisation in similar circumstances.
The Provisional IRA has previously knee-capped young people it has claimed were involved in "anti-social" activities.