Adams: Government should not apologise for IRA
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has today rejected calls for the Irish Government to apologise for the emergence of the IRA in the 1970s.
He said it was spurious for the North's First Minister Peter Robinson to demand a formal acknowledgement that the Republic's authorities should have cracked down on the terror group in its infancy.
"The IRA is not the creation of any Dublin government," said Mr Adams.
"Whatever the Irish Government may have to apologise for - whether it's the heavy gang, whether it's the brutality of prisoners in Portlaoise, whether it's the failure of successive governments attacking the British in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings and other collusion - I don't think it has any apologies to make."
Unionists have argued that the Irish Government should have intervened in its early activity in the Republic to limit the violence.
Mr Adams insisted there was no connection between the Irish Government and the IRA.
He added that the IRA no longer exists before criticising paramilitary displays at the funeral of Real IRA boss Alan Ryan in Dublin. Shots were fired over his coffin by masked men.
"The IRA is gone," said the Co Louth TD. "We should not confuse those little maverick groups who paraded around this city recently. We should not confuse them with the IRA.
"At the time there was war, the IRA fought the war. The war was over. The IRA took that opportunity for peace."
This came just hours before a special debate on the issue in Stormont, where the DUP had indicated it would put forward a motion in the North's administration to formally request an apology.
DUP leader Mr Robinson had insisted there was a "clear connection" between what the IRA did in its infancy and the Government in Ireland.
"I think the Irish Republic would do well to look at its role and recognise that it was not the way it should have behaved in those days, and apologise for it because massive death and destruction followed," said Mr Robinson, whose party shares power with Sinn Féin.
He made the comments after the sole survivor and families of victims of an IRA massacre last week met Taoiseach Enda Kenny, calling for him to say sorry for the Government's failure to not doing more to solve the crime.
Mr Kenny was given a graphic, first-hand account of the ambush near the village of Kingsmill in south Armagh in 1976, which saw 11 Protestant men gunned down on their way home from work. Ten died.
In a statement after the meeting, the Taoiseach said he would reflect and insisted that the IRA was the common enemy of the people of the whole island.
He also assured them they were equally important as victims of IRA violence as everyone else.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin's Mr Adams said he supported continued talks on legacy issues, and that both governments - in Stormont and the Dáil - should facilitate them.
