Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

The killing of Robert McCartney was by any standards, as Deputy Kirk has said, a cruel and horrific murder perpetrated by a gang of brutal cowards. That this was done to an innocent victim is bad enough, but that his family and loved ones have been forced to take on themselves an immensely brave, public struggle to bring the perpetrators to justice, compounds the naked evil of his murder.

Having met and spoken to his sisters and his partner here in Dublin, I am lost in admiration for their unique combination of bravery, dignity, determination and hunger for justice. They are not seeking vengeance or retribution, they are merely seeking justice. They could simply have imploded emotionally from the shock, grief and outrage of the savage attack on Robert, which would have been the reaction for most of us faced with their terrible experience. These brave women refused to be trampled down by thuggery, however, and they refused to let the light of justice be snuffed out by fear. Nothing will bring Robert McCartney back from the dead but, equally, nothing will wash away the stain which his killing has left on the provisional movement. Nothing but the arrest, trial and conviction of his murderers will amount to justice in this case. His loved ones are right to insist that the agencies of public justice should have access to the evidence needed to bring his murderers to the bar of justice. We should remember that information and intelligence, no matter how reliable, are not admissible as evidence in courts. There is no substitute for witnesses. Due process, whether North or South, requires that statements of proposed witnesses should be served on the accused before there can be a trial or, for that matter, a conviction.

This is not the first cowardly killing of this type. Torture and mutilation are, I regret to tell the House, part of the Provo's stock-in-trade. The threat of murder drives many, if not all, of their base criminal activities. The greatest provisional republican deceit, which has been swallowed by a small minority of media commentators, is the suggestion that IRA thuggery and criminality is the sole responsibility of the IRA and that Sinn Féin is some separate democratic chrysalis seeking to break out of a paramilitary cocoon and become an exclusively peaceful and democratic butterfly. People pose as liberation politicians but I am afraid that as regards the provisional movement, the truth is more Mugabe than Mandela.

The provisional movement is a single entity which terms itself the republican movement. It has a single leadership. The entire movement, including Sinn Féin, regards that leadership as the authentic source of political legitimacy on this island. Its decisions are law. Its murders are mere executions. Its tortures are but punishments. Its robberies are just legitimate expropriations. Its network of crime and money laundering are merely the financing of the movement. As we all now know, its actions are, by definition, never criminal. The public is beginning to see the shape of the threat to democracy posed by a movement which uses crime on a massive scale to engage in politics. What has been on view in recent weeks is but the tip of an iceberg. While the public were led to believe that the provisional movement was struggling internally to leap directly, in a clean break, from paramilitarism to politics, the truth was a little more complex. It was, and is, that the army council was preparing to transform the provisional movement by stealth into one in which the political loss-making "hardware division" of the IRA, with its semtex, kalashnikovs, rockets and missiles, was to be replaced with a lightly-armed IRA gendarmerie. The latter would in future act as the enforcers for the criminal and control strategy underpinning Sinn Féin's drive for political power. We now know that the IRA was not planning to go away. It was planning to mutate into something else. It would be the lightly armed means whereby the crime went on, the smuggling zone in the Border counties was protected, the rule of the army council was to be enforced, the funds for politics and power were to be amassed and the Short Strand and many other enclaves were to be dominated and ruled. It was to be the means whereby opponents and rivals would be intimidated and silenced.

I wish to say a few words about another murder victim, Eamonn Collins. His mutilated body was found a few years ago by the roadside in Newry. His death rivalled that of Robert McCartney in terms of the barbarity and cowardice of the perpetrators. In his case, however, he knew he was a marked man. His crime was to testify before a Dublin jury, to tell the truth and point out that Thomas "Slab" Murphy was chief of staff of the IRA and a member of its army council. His crime was to show that the libel case which was being brought against The Sunday Times was a colossal lie and an attempt to punish the media for telling the truth. The jury of Dubliners believed Mr. Collins.

I mention this case because a handful of media commentators still refuses to face up to the truth about the IRA. They apparently do not want to know who is involved. They do not want to see who raided the Northern Bank, how they are laundering the money and what they want to spend it on. I remind them that free speech has its moral duties as well as its legal rights. I also remind them that a terrible price was paid by Eamonn Collins for the right of the Irish people to know the truth about the IRA and its leadership, and for the right of the media to publish the truth. The Provos exacted that price.

I would have thought that any journalist, especially that small minority of journalists who refuse to see the truth, would never forget the fate of Eamonn Collins, or for that matter forget what the moral duty of professional practitioners of free speech which journalists are, demands of them. Like the sisters and partner of Robert McCartney, it demands bravery. That is the issue we have to reflect on tonight, it is simply a matter of bravery. The community across Ireland has to stand up in just the same way as the 300 people who went on the march the other day and confront the threat to our democracy, the rule of law and life itself.

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