Thirty years of cosying up to the men of violence
JEREMY CORBYN
Weeks after the IRA bombed the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984, killing five people, Jeremy Corbyn invited Sinn Fein chief Gerry Adams to speak in Parliament.
After the Brighton bombing, the London Labour Briefing magazine wrote: ‘The British only sit up and take notice of Ireland when they are bombed into it.’ A letter made a joke about dead Tories.
Mr Corbyn yesterday denied reports he was on the editorial board of the publication, but admitted writing for it.
He voted in Parliament against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first step toward what became the Northern Ireland peace process.
He joined a 1986 picket outside the Old Bailey against a ‘show trial’ of a group that included Patrick Magee, the man later convicted of the Brighton Bombing.
In 1993 he stood for a minute’s silence at a Republican meeting in London to honour eight IRA gunmen shot dead in an attack in County Armagh.
Mr Corbyn was asked by BBC Radio Ulster in August 2015: ‘Do you condemn what the IRA did?’ He replied: ‘I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides. What happened in Derry in 1972 was pretty devastating.’
MI5 allegedly opened a file on Mr Corbyn’s links to the IRA in the 1990s.
JOHN MCDONNELL
In 2003, at an event to honour IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, John McDonnell said: ‘It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA.’
Apologising for those remarks in 2015, he said he wanted IRA terrorists to ‘stand down with dignity’. Apologising again last week, Mr McDonnell said his praise for the IRA was part of an attempt to ‘secure the peace process in Northern Ireland’.
In June 2010, when asked what he would do if he could go back in time to the 1980s, he said he would like to ‘assassinate Thatcher’.
DIANE ABBOTT
In 1984 Diane Abbott appeared to back an IRA victory in an interview with a pro-Republican journal. Miss Abbott said Ireland ‘is our struggle – every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat ... would be a defeat indeed.’
In the same interview she said: ‘Though I was born here in London, I couldn’t identify as British. Anyone who comes from a former colony knows the troops always have to come out.’ She said Northern Ireland was an ‘enclave of white supremacist ideologies’.