Mairia Cahill

The media should engage as well as scrutinise, but there should be no glossing over the uncomfortable past, writes Mairia Cahill

After the Mary Lou interview

AS a child, I used to pass a mural in Oakman Street, bearing the image of a woman and a jester mask above an opened Irish history book. The mask bore the word “revisionism”, and the woman “truth”.

The slogan on the wall in huge white letters above the image said, “History is written by the winner”.

Sometimes, you’d find a British soldier hunkered at its side peering through his scope surrounded by a gaggle of curious kids, other times in the evening you’d find the local IRA men on patrol looking for teenagers who had fallen foul of them, to threaten, beat or shoot.

Keeping the community safe, they called it.

I doubt that this mural ever came under Mary Lou McDonald’s notice, though it’s a slogan Sinn Fein could have invented when it comes to their justification, and some would say, rewritten narrative, of the IRA.

Before the charge of bias comes swinging at me, let me state this clearly. I have seen devastation as friends’ parents were killed by loyalist groups. I have also witnessed state violence. I have had extended family members who were in senior positions in the IRA, and family members who wanted nothing to do with them. Life in Northern Ireland is complex.

I grew up in an area where masters of manipulation spun lines from their living rooms to rival government spindoctors regarding what was happening on the street outside. It’s easy to get sucked into a narrative. Death and destruction happened across the board — yet there has traditionally been additional probing of Sinn Fein, given their defence of the Provisional IRA campaign, and this newspaper has taken a harder stance than most.

Last weekend, McDonald took part in her first major interview in these pages.

It is right that she was afforded the opportunity to do so. Media should engage, as well as scrutinise, and one does not have to be sacrificed for the other.

McDonald tweeted after the interview printed: “For decades they have attacked us, talked at us, and about us. Now they are talking to us. That’s good…”

I admit to being frustrated with this framing. Journalists from INM have been threatened in the past by republicans — both online and in person. Some moved home because it wasn’t judged safe to write critiques of the IRA. And yet, they continued to do so. A free press is the cornerstone of democracy, as the saying goes.

In 2014, after I waived anonymity, this paper contacted every female

TD in Leinster House, including McDonald, to ask them whether they believed my account. Sinn Fein

TDs, unlike the majority of others, did not respond.

INM journalists who covered the case were deluged with abuse on social media and in some speeches to party activists, as I was, by members of Sinn Fein. The atmosphere was appalling, so much so, that I was fearful of returning to Belfast in case my then three-year-old daughter was put at risk.

Graffiti was daubed in big letters on a wall in the area where I was raped. As the victim of the abuse, I was accused by Sinn Fein of slurring them. Four years later they issued a halfapology to me and expected everyone to move on.

McDonald has conceded in her recent interview that my case was “badly handled”. She states I am “brave” and “courageous”. She hopes that they handled it right in the end, referring to her meeting with me in 2018.

I beg to differ. At that meeting, I outlined to her that Sinn Fein never admitted that I was made to face my abuser in an IRA “investigation”, much less the use of Sinn Fein offices for other parts of that “investigation”.

Her position was that as the leader of Sinn

Fein, it was not her place to say whether an IRA investigation into my abuse happened or not.

I again disagree, given that her party’s response to my case once I waived anonymity compounded the damage caused to me by republicans in the first place.

A 2018 Police Ombudsman investigation confirmed what I had already stated — that the IRA had investigated my abuse. In 2015 Keir Starmer also found failings in my court cases by the Public Prosecution service. The PPS and the PSNI took responsibility and implemented change for abuse victims.

To date, no action has ever been taken by Sinn Fein against any member who had a role to play.

That’s important, because that is the very reason why I have scant regard for anything the current Sinn Fein president says about me — it means nothing, because little was done, or seen to be done.

McDonald was also quoted last Sunday as saying the IRA campaign was “justified” and that it was a “war”, albeit one she doesn’t want repeated. Last week on LMFM, she also stated that the IRA murder of Patrick Kelly was “wrong”. His son David appeared on the BBC’s The Nolan Show the next day and said she should refer to it as “murder” instead.

The difficulty with the position McDonald has taken is that Sinn Fein has consistently called for truth and justice from others and insist “there should be no hierarchy of victims”.

To state one murder is wrong (as it was) while saying the IRA “campaign” was “justified” leaves her open to victims asking — does she therefore believe some murders were right?

What about kneecapping young people, a regular feature of the IRA campaign — was that wrong, or was it justified, Mary Lou?

It’s a fair question, though not one Sinn Fein will like.

It is hard to see how anyone could justify the

IRA making a human bomb out of Derryman Patsy Gillespie — yet that’s exactly what Martin McGuinness did when he said he was a “legitimate target” for working as a cook at an army base.

When Charlie McIlmurray, a taxi driver approached by the RUC to turn informer, was later found dead on a border road in 1987, Gerry Adams’s response to camera was: “Mr McIlmurray, like anyone else living in west Belfast, knows that the consequences for informing is death.”

Justified? Or wrong?

The reason Sinn Fein are asked frequently about their response to IRA atrocities is not because they are being picked on, but precisely because they are in government in the North and aspiring to government in Dublin.

They are also the party who continues to hold commemorations for IRA volunteers.

No journalist could justifiably ignore the subject, even if it is a source of frustration for McDonald who would undoubtedly rather just answer questions on politics.

Back to that childhood mural. Sinn Fein may eventually be seen as “winners” when it comes to obtaining power, but they also have to understand that their narrative of the IRA as justified freedom fighters repulses some who see it as an attempt to rewrite history.

Journalists, like those in this paper, have given victims — who are otherwise up against a powerful political machine — a voice to expose atrocities perpetrated on them.

I, for one, am grateful for that. Without it, there would be a blank page in that history book, now labelled “IRA sexual abuse”.

‘Journalists, like those in this paper, have given victims a voice to expose atrocities perpetrated on them’