North debate: Sinn Féin and the IRA must not be allowed to take the Tricolour from the Irish people, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell declared.
"The Tricolour is our national flag - the symbol of the Republic which we serve. That Republic has one army, one police, one constitution. It is a democracy," he told the Progressive Democrats conference. In one of his strongest attacks on Sinn Féin and the IRA, Mr McDowell sharply rejected charges that his recent criticism of both organisations is "anti-republican".
"The Progressive Democrats is a genuine party of the Republic. Our values are republican, our vision is republican, our methods are republican. Let me say that true republicanism does not speak in muffled voices through balaclavas.
"True republicans do not finance their political campaigns by organising major crime. True republicans do not shoot car thieves in their knees and ankles.
"True republicans do not plant bombs to kill civilians at Enniskillen, at Omagh, at the Le Mon hotel, or at Manchester, Birmingham and Canary Wharf.
"No true republican could have looked through binoculars at the children playing on a boat at Mullaghmore before deliberately blowing them to pieces."
In a barb directed at Sinn Féin's Mr Gerry Adams, Mr McDowell went on: "And no true republican could publicly lie and lie again about his involvement in a movement which brought all of this about. The greatest civic moral duty on all of us is to emphatically reclaim not merely the label, but also the substance of republicanism as the birthright and property of the great majority. It should not be left as the flag of convenience for the sick double-standards of the Provisionals." Genuine republicans must work to reconcile Orange and Green, "not hanker after some wretched, half-baked Marxist society that would be repugnant to anyone to whom it was fully explained."
