Bomb-backing editor doubted IRA ‘rape victim’

A FORMER Fleet Street editor attacked an alleged IRA rape victim in a newspaper article while hiding his own support for the terrorists.

Ex-Daily Mirror boss Roy Greenslade, 74, came out of hiding this week to reveal he backed the IRA’s bombing campaign.

The former professor of journalism at City, University of London, was a friend of suspected Hyde Park bomber John Downey and from the 1980s wrote for the republican newsletter An Phoblacht.

Yesterday, Mr Greenslade, who lectured on ethics, was branded ‘disgusting’ for calling into question the testimony of an alleged rape victim.

Mairia Cahill, who has waived her right to anonymity, said that after she was interviewed for a BBC Northern Ireland investigation, Mr Greenslade wrote an article in The Guardian attacking ‘the lack of political balance’ in the report. She had claimed that at 16 she was ‘ repeatedly raped by an IRA man’.

She complained to police in 2010, but the case was dropped four years later when she withdrew her support for the prosecution. However, a subsequent BBC documentary detailed her ordeal, only to be savaged by Mr Greenslade in The Guardian in 2014, where he said it ‘failed to take account of the fact that the woman... was a leading member of a dissident republican organisation with an anti-Sinn Fein agenda.’

Writing in The Spectator this week, Miss Cahill cited the lack of relevance of her political allegiance. She added: ‘After attacking the ‘lack of balance’ in the BBC NI piece, he then took it upon himself to list my political history – some of it inaccurate – which he viewed as highly relevant when discussing my brutal experience of abuse, and of the IRA and Sinn Fein’s treatment of me as a result. Strange (and some would say hypocritical) that he did not disclose in the same piece, his own secret long-held support for the IRA.’

Miss Cahill hailed from a prominent republican family. Her great-uncle Joe was an infamous former chief of staff in the Provisionals. Hitting out at Mr Greenslade for alleging her accusations were political, she added: ‘That Greenslade chose the angle he did is not surprising, but it is disgusting. No abuse disclosures should be weighed against victims’ previous politics.

‘That The Guardian chose to print it is extremely questionable, given that by that time it was widely known that he had written anonymously for the Sinn Fein IRA supporting publication, An Phoblacht.’