At lunch time in the Seanad, the Justice Minister Michael McDowell laid heavily into Sinn Fein, making direct comparisons between the killings at Teebane with the ‘separations’ in the death camp at Auschwitz. In effect he gets at the sectarian nature of the operation, and the political direction behind it. The report will become live at the Oireachtas site in about an hour and a half.
Update: The minister obviously had his massacre’s mixed. Teebane was the result of an IRA bomb, whilst the separation happened at Kingsmill, nearly twenty years earlier.
Update to the update: the Minister later corrected himself on radioThe polemic is seering:
“The same intellectual activity which drove a man standing at the railway platform in Auschwitz – to send people right and left into different groups for different fates – was standing in a balaclava at Teebane crossroads when a group of workers was segregated into Protestant and Catholic and the former group was riddled by the Provisional IRA. On this Holocaust memorial week, this spirit is not dead – it is the same spirit which had Ratko Mladic and others separate the boys from others at Srebenica and bring them to quarries to execute them with the same ferocity. If what happened at Teebane crossroads is not a crime in the minds of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, it is they who have a problem – not us.”
We understand this is only the beginning of the kind of gloves off attacks that Sinn Fein may expect from all political sides in the Republic in the wake of a crime that few outside the Republican movement doubt was undertaken by the IRA.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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