Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is hugely important, and I thank Mr. Adams for doing so. I believe, as Irish nationalists, that reconciliation is the Irish imperative first. That is the objective. Mr. Adams talks about reconciliation in his paper. However, the language I, also as an Irish nationalist, picked up from it was Tory Government, unionist death squad, DUP intransigence, and the Irish Government has no effective strategy. To me, it was not the language of being able to look to the future. At the same time, as Senator Currie said, there is no acknowledgement whatsoever of a campaign that killed 3,600 people. Throughout the course of his statement he refers to waiting for meetings while there were reports of atrocities in the prisons and the streets and so on, as though Sinn Féin and the IRA had nothing to do with any of that. What Mr. Adams is saying about the future, reconciliation and acts of reconciliation jars, even today, with the language in his paper.

Two things came up in the course of our work on the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. They were two specific examples of reconciliation that are still available to be made. One of them, as he has highlighted correctly today, is the Pat Finucane situation. Both Houses of the Oireachtas have acknowledged that. What we do not treat with equivalence in the Oireachtas is the death of Edgar Graham. I do not think that equivalent treatment has come yet from Sinn Féin, but I hope it will. The Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and I acknowledged it in the Dáil on his anniversary. He was also a lawyer murdered in Northern Ireland. Can we get to a point where we can treat those two deaths with equivalence? The second example comes from this committee, exactly 12 months ago. We had the families of the disappeared here. As Senator Currie said, we have our little badges which we are probably not supposed to wear. We are wearing them anyway today as others do on different occasions. In his final contribution in December 2021, Michael McConville said:

I have always wanted the IRA to apologise to our family for murdering our mother. I know it has apologised by saying it to everyone at the time it admitted to murdering these people. All I wanted was for the IRA to say it was wrong in murdering our mother, and that she was not an informant. She was not an informant, and it has been proven that she was not.

This is testimony given to our committee as examples of reconciliation that can yet be made. Would these two examples be on the cards? Would these be things that, as an influential person in Sinn Féin and the republican movement, that Mr. Adams could recommend to Sinn Féin as major examples of reconciliation that could be made?