NI Conservatives’ co-chair, Trevor Ringland, has said that Billy Hutchison is ”rewriting history”, after the PUP leader claimed that murdering two Catholics in the 1970s helped prevent a united Ireland.
“His comments are deliberately misguided and they represent a dangerous strain of thinking we keep hearing from apologists for both the loyalist and the republican terror campaigns”, Trevor remarked. “Let’s be quite clear, neither the IRA campaign of violence, nor the UVF campaign, nor the campaign of any other terrorist organisation, achieved one iota for Northern Ireland or for their supposed political causes. It is true that many young men and young women did things during that time that they would not otherwise have done, but it undermines any room for sympathy from the rest of society, if some people continue to justify murder and brutality.”
“Billy Hutchison’s remarks follow closely an article by Declan Kearney, which demonstrated again Sinn Féin’s failure to accept the IRA’s responsibility for so many bloody and futile acts. It doesn’t fit with either Hutchison or Kearney’s interpretation, but the truth is that it was the security forces who were, overwhelmingly, keeping people across the whole community safe, preventing Northern Ireland slipping into civil war and eventually forcing the various terrorist groups to give up violence.”
“A critical element of any means of dealing with the past must be an acknowledgement, across the board, that all unlawful acts committed as part of the Troubles were wrong, whether they were perpetrated by republicans, loyalists or, on a small number of occasions, by members of the security forces. For the sake of Northern Ireland’s future, we must continue to challenge the warped interpretation of events which we still hear from apologists for violence.”