Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

At the centre of the issue is the rape of a child, the sexual abuse of a 16-year old girl. While we debate the very serious issues before us, we must never forget that.

Maíria Cahill is an extraordinary woman, whom I had the privilege to meet briefly yesterday. Despite the horrendous acts of abuse that were perpetrated against her at a young age, she has had the courage to come forward, to identify herself and to take on a powerful, ruthless and unforgiving machine – Sinn Féin and the IRA. I applaud her courage and bravery. She is facing down both her rapist and also those who still seek to protect him. She is standing firm, for herself and for other victims of sexual abuse by the IRA. I wish to assure her that I believe her and that the Tánaiste, and my colleagues and I in the Labour Party are here to support her – and the other children across the country who were abused by the IRA.

Not every victim is willing to identify himself or herself, understandably so. Deputy Gerry Adams and his colleagues in Sinn Féin, through the treatment that has been meted out to Maíria Cahill since her shocking disclosures about rape and cover-up, have done everything in their power to prevent further disclosures. It is the code of omerta that I find particularly reprehensible. Human rights are universal rights. One either believes in human rights for all or for none. Sinn Féin has sought to cherry-pick; to decide who is deserving of the application of human rights. It wants to sit as judge and jury, as it did in Maíria's case, on those to whom these rights should be afforded. That is wrong. It is hypocritical and it exposes the double standards of Sinn Féin.

There are clearly also double standards when it comes to the women of Sinn Féin, who have been uncharacteristically silent on these grave matters. Where are Deputies Mary Lou McDonald and Sandra McLellan? Where does the Sinn Féin Senator and female councillors stand on the matter? Let us compare, as the Tánaiste sought to do, Deputy McDonald’s characteristically forthright condemnation of how, as she put it, “the most powerful men in the Catholic Church in the Dublin diocese conspired to protect abusers of children” in “a gross betrayal of generations of children”. She demanded that they face the full rigours of the law, and she was right. However, compared with that condemnation then we now have deafening silence, despite equally horrendous allegations and an identical widespread cover-up of wrongdoing. Only this morning we heard Deputy McDonald quite correctly call for whistleblowers to be listened to and their allegations fully investigated. Deputy McDonald seems to very fond of whisteblowers, as long as they are not IRA whistleblowers. When it is an IRA whistleblower, Sinn Féin closes ranks and retreats while issuing ambiguous statements about the “culture of the time”, “honest mistakes” and, most disgusting of all, insinuations about the mental health of any of their accusers. Anyone who ever contradicts the accepted narrative from the Sinn Féin leadership is given the exact same treatment. It is utterly predictable. For example, they make statements such as "The person is suffering from stress", "They are confused", "It was a long time ago", "Ah sure God love them they have got it mixed up" and, best of all, "Sure they are opponents of the peace process". I am sorry, but that is not good enough.

I am deeply disturbed by the pattern that is now emerging of IRA abusers being moved south of the Border when their horrendous crimes were made known. At least some of the child predators were moved to my own constituency, my home county, one I am proud to represent, the county of Louth. We know that convicted paedophile, Liam Adams, Deputy Gerry Adams’s brother, was working for Sinn Féin in County Louth. We know that the Sinn Féin leader was aware that his niece had endured terrible abuse at the hands of her father – his brother – when Liam Adams crossed the Border to work in Louth. We know Liam Adams had access to minors as he ran a youth scheme in Dundalk in my home county. It has also emerged that two brothers allege they were sexually abused as boys by an IRA member believed to be on the run in their home, in an IRA safe house in County Louth.

A current Sinn Féin councillor admits that he knew of the allegations but he did not report them to the police. How many other cases might there be? Of course I accept that in the 1990s, policing in Northern Ireland was a major issue and the RUC was not trusted in republican communities. The paramilitaries filled the vacuum and they took over policing in their communities.

It is very late in the day for Sinn Féin to now acknowledge that the paramilitaries were unsuited to that task, particularly with regard to crimes as serious and as sensitive as sexual offences perpetrated against children. We know both republican and loyalist paramilitaries used intimidation, naked violence and exile, to maintain order. They cloaked their thuggery with a veneer of justice under the guise of kangaroo courts.

We must acknowledge a sad truth that in the course of the peace process the otherwise admirable desire for a workable alternative to the discredited justice system led some people to examine the concept of restorative justice. We saw the creation of state-funded community-based restorative justice schemes. We then saw many of those schemes being hijacked to operate as a shallow system of paramilitary justice, of rough justice, without any oversight or accountability whatsoever. As the Tánaiste pointed out in her contribution we saw Maíria Cahill's abuser walking the streets of west Belfast as Sinn Féin's organiser for community restorative justice. How perverse is that? The upshot for Northern Ireland is that the unwillingness to work with police and the prominent involvement of paramilitaries created a crisis of credibility for community restorative justice.

Both governments must accept their share of responsibility for allowing this chaotic situation to develop by surrendering what is a core function of state to self-appointed vigilantes. We either have the primacy of the rule of law or we do not.

Another result is that displaced individuals seemingly unknown to the authorities but known to the IRA, were removed from their communities on grounds of serious crimes against children and are living, who knows where, in Ireland and Britain; Sinn Féin knows.

The final consequence is that the new generation of Sinn Féin members - Deputies and other public representatives - must come to terms with these historic wrongs and must do all they can to have them publicly acknowledged and corrected. We cannot have more weasel words. We cannot have any more equivocation or any more cant about events being of their time, about wrongdoers having long since left the scene, about not applying present day standards to some faraway past. We must judge what happened in exactly the same light as we have judged the appalling institutional cover-ups of other organisations.

At times, perhaps, all political parties can be accused of attaching too much importance to the need for party loyalty and party discipline but the truth is there is no other movement on this island, political, social, cultural or religious, whose leadership would have survived the succession of revelations that have been made about Deputy Adams's treatment of child sexual abuse either in his own family or in his wider political family. Yet even when cardinals have fallen, Deputy Adams is still standing because he is propped upright by those surrounding him and still supporting him. Even if they are not personally to blame for the events of the past, the new generation of Sinn Féin members and representatives must share responsibility for this travesty which makes a visible mockery of their crocodile concerns. They must demand the information their leaders have on cases of sexual abuse; they must do what they can to ensure that justice is finally done and seen to be done. They must apply the normal standards of decency we expect of all our citizens and all our public representatives but to date they have not done so; they have signally failed to do so. They should and they must, stand up, speak out and break the disturbing Sinn Féin code of omerta.

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