My praise for IRA killers helped bring peace – McDonnell
JOHN McDonnell sparked fury yesterday after claiming his praise for the ‘sacrifice’ of IRA killers was an attempt to promote lasting peace in Northern Ireland.
Jeremy Corbyn’s most senior ally was defending comments he made in 2003 at an event to commemorate the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
At the time, he said IRA terrorists should be ‘honoured’ and that it was the ‘bombs and bullets and sacrifice’ which led to peace talks.
Yesterday Mr McDonnell renewed an apology over the comments, but also tried to take partial credit for the end of the Troubles, saying he was ‘pleased’ to help. He came under fire from both political opponents and victims of IRA attacks.
At a Press conference in Westminster, the shadow chancellor was asked again about the 2003 remarks, and what he would say to pensioners who remember his support for the IRA bombing campaign.
Mr McDonnell said: ‘I apologise for those words, but I also said no cause is worth an innocent life and I made that explicitly clear. I also did everything I possibly could to secure the peace process in Northern Ireland and at times that was contentious, of course.
‘We were trying to talk to people you were condemned for talking to, then we discovered that governments were talking to them anyway.’ He added: ‘I think the peace process was as a result of a dialogue that many undertook, and if I contributed in any small way I was pleased to do so. But I apologise for the language that I used.’
Former Tory minister Lord Tebbit, whose wife Margaret was paralysed in the 1984 Brighton bombing, accused Mr McDonnell of having been an IRA ‘cheerleader’.
‘He should try apologising to the victims of the terrorists that he supported,’ Lord Tebbit said. ‘He wasn’t trying to secure peace, he was trying to secure a victory for the IRA.
‘And of course he has got form... he once said he would like to go back to the 1980s and assassinate Margaret Thatcher, an ambition he shared with the IRA.’
DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson said: ‘I don’t think anyone in Northern Ireland is buying into this rewriting of the history of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell’s relationship with senior Republicans, and I think they need to come clean on where they stand in relation to IRA violence ... Do they condemn the murder of innocent civilians and police officers?’
Mr McDonnell has previously said IRA members should be able to ‘stand down with dignity’. And in 2010, he joked about going back to the 1980s to ‘assassinate Thatcher’. He later apologised for the ‘joke’.
Mr Corbyn has spoken alongside senior figures from Sinn Fein such as Gerry Adams, and two weeks after the 1984 Brighton bombing, he invited convicted IRA terrorists Linda Quigley and Gerard McLoughlin to the House of Commons.