IRA's perverse campaign to sanitise its past
25 August 2008
Commenting on reports that hundreds of convicted IRA terrorists are planning a concerted drive to overturn their convictions and claim compensation, Jim Allister QC MEP said:-
“Every terrorist conviction in Northern Ireland was the product of a due process with built in double judicial protection. Not only did a senior Judge preside over every trial but every convicted terrorist – unlike “ordinary” criminals - had an automatic right of appeal to 3 Judges in the Court of Appeal, and beyond, if appropriate. So every finding of guilt was well sifted judicially.
No one should deny that occasional miscarriages of justice occurred, but the suggestion that hundreds of IRA terrorists, duly convicted, were in fact innocent, is preposterous.
Let’s remember the IRA murdered over 2000 innocent people. Would they now have us believe that persons other than those convicted committed those and other heinous crimes. I know the IRA/Sinn Fein is on a mission to sanitise its past, and that for some such could be politically convenient, but their ranks are not the habitation of the innocent. The innocent populate the graves of Ulster, put there primarily by IRA/Sinn Fein and thus it would be stomach-turning to see this campaign at re-writing history gaining any credence in the courts.
Think, too, of the malevolent assistance such a process could be given if Sinn Fein got anywhere near policing and justice powers. McGuinness able to exercise influence over who is appointed and removed from the Judiciary is the greatest single reason why policing and justice must not be devolved, because those powers would go to OFMDFM.”
