Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has doubled down on her comments about joining the IRA if she’d grown up north of the border.
She said it was a matter of “context” and if she’d been raised in the Troubles she would have joined the terror group.
The politician added: “The point I was making was this – human beings act for their context, for the circumstances in which they find themselves.
“I believe that many, many people who did volunteer to the IRA and who ended up in jail would have lived very different lives if their context was different.
“I actually think it’s unfair for people who lived at a very safe distance or who didn’t experience what working-class republican and nationalist families experienced to jump to conclusions…”
In an interview on The Meaning Of Life with Joe Duffy, Ms McDonald said people were caught up in “a war that they didn’t start” and “knew they had to defend themselves”.
He grilled her about the deaths of innocent victims including Angela Gallagher who was 17 months old when she was shot dead by the IRA in 1971.
Ms McDonald added: “You’re never going to square the circle of grief for families who have lost loved ones. I can’t undo the past.
“It’s not a case of endorsing... I see my role and work I do as working for the things that ensure that we never, ever go back to that time again. I think it would be an extraordinary ask of anyone to take on everything in the past.
“Its place is in Irish history and it has to be history. That is not about trying to glamorise what happened… it’s not a contest of hurts.”
There is an awkward silence when Duffy asks her why she still considers men who carried out or ordered murders to be her heroes.
But she eventually replied: “I believe that… everybody that was caught up in the conflict of the IRA all of it had a context, all of it was down to failure of politics.
“There is no justification for violence, at this time we have a viable democratic path. There is no reason, no excuse for violence, none.”
The politician also speaks about her anxiety and Covid-19 experience.
She said: “If anything would bedevil me I think it would be anxiety.
“I think there is a whole art of learning how to sit down and to breathe and learning to be calm.”
She revealed she lost some of her hair from Covid-19, but surviving the virus also gave her a new-found appreciation of life.
Ms McDonald said: “My overall feeling is incredible fortune.”
- The Meaning Of Life is on RTE One tonight at 10.30pm.
