No member of An Garda Síochána should have been hurt or harmed during the Northern Ireland “conflict”, the leader of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, has said.
She was responding on South East Radio to recent comments from the former Wexford hurling manager, Liam Griffin, who accused her of “hypocrisy, self-righteousness and populism” and described the IRA as “thugs and murderers”.
The son of a former garda, Mr Griffin made his comments at the launch of a book about the history of An Garda Síochána during which he mentioned the murder of Det Garda Seamus Quaid by the IRA in Wexford in October 1980.
Ms McDonald said she was sorry that Mr Griffin felt such a sense of personal animosity towards her and that for many people “what happened in the conflict still hurts”.
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“No member of the gardaí, nobody wearing the uniform of An Garda Síochána should have been hurt or harmed in any way in the course of that conflict.”
The party leader told South East Radio presenter Alan Corcoran that she was not the author of history and could not change it. “What I can do, and what I have done in the course of my political life, is to commit myself firmly to work for the future.”
She said she wanted to build peace and reconciliation. “All I can do is extend my sympathy, my heartfelt sorrow, and on behalf of those who were hurt or harmed by republicans in any guise in any set of circumstances, to offer a heartfelt apology and a genuine sense of solidarity and understanding of what that loss means.”
Ms McDonald also commented on evidence in the ongoing trial of Gerry Hutch in the Special Criminal Court, where a tape recording of former Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Dowdall has been heard in which he claimed that Ms McDonald had used the Hutch family for votes and money.
She said that she had never met Mr Hutch and that no gangland figure had ever donated money to Sinn Féin or any member of the party.
Mr Corcoran played a clip of an interview he had conducted with Shane Ross, the author of the recently published biography of the Sinn Féin leader. In the extract Mr Ross said that, in order to get to be president of Sinn Féin, Ms McDonald had to support the position of her predecessor, Gerry Adams, on a number of matters including the murder by the IRA of Jean McConville, and that this had been “uncomfortable” for her.
Ms McDonald said she made up her own mind on things. Mr Ross, she said, “is a poor biographer and a poorer mindreader, judging by that extract”. He was “a person who clearly doesn’t know me terribly well at all”.
She described as nonsense and rubbish the suggestion that the IRA army council had a role in the running of Sinn Féin. “I am the leader of Sinn Féin. Michelle O’Neill is the deputy leader of Sinn Féin.”
Sinn Féin has a “democratically elected leadership of the party” and a “management system to run the party because it is now a very large national organisation”.
“It is not lost on me and it is not lost on Michelle that this issue of who runs Sinn Féin is an issue now that women for the large part are in the driving seat.”
