NI Conservatives’ co-chair, Trevor Ringland, has accused Basil McCrea MLA of “coming perilously close to legitimising republican violence and acting as an apologist for the IRA”.
“I realise that Basil is searching for headlines and something distinctive to say”, Trevor observed. “However you really have to question the judgement of some of his latest statements and in particular some of the comments about republicanism.”
“To say that republicans ‘need something to sell’ and to cite the Maze development, is to come very close to implying that we need to allow people involved in paramilitarism to celebrate and justify their violent past. David Trimble was right when he said that just because you have a past doesn’t mean that you can’t have a future, but we must be very clear that people who acted outside the law during the Troubles were wrong.”
“We must build a society where we can all prosper and that is certainly not a matter of offering republicans, or loyalists, ‘something to sell’ to fellow extremists. Neither is it a matter of parties at the political extremes trading ‘concessions’. NI Conservatives will offer a voice for everyone in our community, but we will never accept a future where it is ok to glorify violence by groups who murdered so many people, including members of our party.”
“People in our generation have made some difficult sacrifices in order to move Northern Ireland on to a peaceful and stable future, for the benefit of all of us. However, by championing a centre at the Maze, Basil McCrea might be carving out a unique position in the overcrowded territory of ‘ourselves alone’ unionist parties, but he’s also being hugely insensitive to victims of violence.”
“If we’re to have a genuinely shared society, we simply cannot pass a message unto our young people that extremists were justified in using violence or that a small number of members of the security forces were justified in acting outside the law. We cannot let former paramilitaries glorify their actions and we certainly cannot accept that their ‘cause’ was legitimate.”