Noel Harrington (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes, that is fine. We are having this debate because of the brave stand taken by Maíria Cahill in telling us about the abuse she suffered at the hands of a member of the IRA and the subsequent events within the republican movement. People in the republican movement have confirmed that they believe the abuse took place, but that belief evaporates when it comes to implicating the Sinn Féin leadership. We have been subjected to a web of untruths that have been spun to protect the Sinn Féin leader, his party leadership and his supporters from his past. I suggest we might know he is telling the truth when he stops blaming everyone and anyone and instead accepts responsibility for his actions and deeds in the past and the present.

When Deputy Adams spoke earlier in this debate, he again wrapped himself in the victim's shroud by saying the republican movement was forced into this situation because the people had no faith in the police. All of the victims seem to have shared one certainty, which is that they would have been shot if they as much as doffed their cap to a policeman. How many of those who were found with their hands tied behind their backs and bullets in the backs of their heads, courtesy of this assassination squad, had turned to the police? How many of them, having been hauled before kangaroo courts, failed the body language test and turned up murdered in the ditches of country roads on both sides of the Border? How many more were spirited away and relocated in this and other jurisdictions?

This is the crux of the issue before us today. How can we believe a group of self-interested quasi-political cultists, the first priority of whom is the protection of their political party, Sinn Féin, which translates as "we ourselves"? I cannot think of anything more abhorrent to a republic. Sinn Féin has hijacked the republican ethos we all share, just as it hijacked the civil rights movement and replaced it with a violent narrow nationalism that manifested itself in intimidation, hate and confusion. Again, this is repugnant to the republicanism that was proclaimed almost 100 years ago. When Sinn Féin is criticised here or in the media, the wagons are circled. The Tricolour is draped, displayed and abused as if the ideals of this nation were being threatened. A narrow nationalism manifests itself once again.

In this case, we know that the leadership of the IRA, one of whom was the perpetrator, wanted to act as judge, jury and executioner. I remind the House that Article 38.1 of the Constitution of this Republic, Bunreacht na Éireann, provides that "no person shall be tried on any criminal charge save in due course of law." The response of Sinn Féin and the IRA to these matters was to set up kangaroo courts. They were not courts - they were gatherings set aside to intimidate victims. When this case was finally due to come before these IRA people, how did members of the republican movement suddenly become experts? They filled the room that was acting as a courthouse to further intimidate the victim. These people are not the protectors of their own community, but classic followers of an omerta.

Members of Sinn Féin claim they are the great protectors of equality, which is a noble aspiration. Sadly, protection and equality are strange bedfellows when it comes to justice for representatives of Sinn Féin and the IRA. This is the duplicitous republicanism we now see from Sinn Féin, which has more faces than Big Ben. We are all aware of its involvement in various practices on both sides of the Border, including protection rackets, bank robberies, cigarette and drug smuggling, money laundering, diesel laundering, petrol and Lucozade stretching and milk quotas. I have heard the Sinn Féin leadership calling ad nauseamfor measures to deal with these issues, thereby masking the reality that these main players are graduates of the university of terror that many of those who occupy seats in this House helped to establish. How could we expect a party that displays such hypocrisy to find justice for a vulnerable and terrified child who had been abused?

I know many good and fine people in west Cork who have voted for Sinn Féin and will do so again. I socialise with them. They are decent people. I can say quite frankly that what has happened was not done in their names. I ask those people, and the decent people within the leadership of this political party, to get a grip, to move away from the cult and to wake up and redeem themselves.

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