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RSSUUP leader "glad" about McAleese apology
29/01/2005 - 08:35:31
Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble has told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he welcomes President Mary McAleese’s apology about remarks that she made in a radio interview where she drew an analogy between Northern Protestant sectarianism and Nazis.
“I'm glad that there has been an apology, because I considered the remarks remarkably ill-judged,” he said.
“It is most unlike her to make a mistake of that nature, a mistake because it trivialises the experience of European Jewry and trivialises the Holocaust and also causes considerable offence in Northern Ireland.
“While no doubt that is true of some people, it is not right to lump together the Protestants of Northern Ireland and accuse them of this and to ignore the fact that a considerable amount of hatred exists within some members of the Catholic community.”
The President has accepted full responsibility for the hurt caused by what she calls her "clumsy remarks" about Protestant sectarianism.
During a reference to the Holocaust in a radio interview on Thursday, she compared how children in the North were taught to hate Catholics in the same way as Nazis hated Jews.
