Allister repudiates beatification of Martin McGuinness
21 March 2009
Extract from a speech by Jim Allister QC MEP to the annual dinner of Ballymoney TUV
“IRA murder is back on our streets and, yet, the government, media and chattering classes are full of orchestrated praise for those that hold the patent on such murder, IRA/Sinn Fein. The temporal beatification of Martin McGuinnes has begun. You would think to listen to some that blood did not drip from his hands. Let me make it clear the IRA of government is no different or better than the IRA which stood over two dying soldiers and pumped more bullets into their bodies – something Sinn Fein has yet to describe as “murder”. Yet, foolish Unionists, even the DUP candidate in the Euro election, praise the “positivity” of McGuinness.
I’ve no praise for the one Peter Robinson once dubbed “the Bogside Butcher”. Rather, I recognise that murder and mayhem got him and his Party to their positions of power today. And, that such reward for violence has and will induce more violence.
The tragedy is that as the price of placating Sinn Fein our security defences have been dismantled. In truth we are less equipped to face resurgent terrorism than ever before, because the false euphoria of the “peace process” swept along a tide of “normalisation”, which bequeathed us a mere police service, denuded of Special Branch, experienced detectives and vital intelligence-gathering, and put at the heart of government those who will resist any effective anti-terrorist measures.
To even dare say these things is to be berated as an “enemy of peace”, whereas those who waged terrorist war for 30 years are now paraded as paragons of virtue. Such is the distorting propaganda of the moment that the recent IRA murders are twisted to have been attacks on the Stormont Regime, when they were nothing other than the age-old attack on the British connection and it is within the Stormont Regime that we find past masters of the same order of terrorism.”
