The Ulster Unionist Party’s Justice Spokesperson, Doug Beattie MC MLA, has responded to comments by the journalist Peter Taylor by saying that people are responsible for their own actions and choices.
Doug Beattie MC MLA said:
“The recent comments by the journalist Peter Taylor that ‘had I been a teenager on Bloody Sunday I probably would have joined the IRA’ have rightly attracted a great deal of comment.
“It feeds into a certain narrative that people aren’t really responsible for their actions, but are instead helpless victims of outside forces over which they have no control and is a very convenient excuse for the people responsible for decades of brutal and cruel terrorist attacks.
“It completely ignores the fact that everybody has a choice and is responsible for their own actions. It may well be that they initially thought by joining these organisations they were defending their neighbourhoods. However the moment any organisation starts to burn innocent victims alive, murder people purely because of religion or strap men to vehicle bombs because they wanted to provide a living for their families, that should have led to a mass exodus from these organisations.
“We should be forever grateful that not everyone affected by the horrors of the Troubles sought to follow the path Peter Taylor ‘probably’ would have done, and added to the mayhem and chaos that enveloped Northern Ireland from the early 1970s onward.
“How much worse would it have been if everyone affected by the Claudy bombing had decided to join the UVF in a bid to strike back at the IRA? Or if all those who lost loved ones in the IRA bomb at the La Mon had decided to gain some form of revenge via the UFF?
“Peter Taylor’s comments serve to play down the fact that the IRA was already engaged in terrorist activity long before the 30th January 1972. Indeed three days before Bloody Sunday two police officers were murdered by the IRA in the Creggan area of Londonderry adding to the soldiers and members of the RUC who were also murdered by the IRA earlier that month, before Bloody Sunday and therefore not as a result of it.
“The murder of three young Scottish soldiers in north Belfast in March 1971 was not in response to Bloody Sunday. Nor were the IRA bomb and gun attacks in 1970.
“We have already been faced with suggestions that even those injured by their own hand should be entitled to pensions just as the people they injured. It will not be long until siren voices try to tell us that the terrorists who committed some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles are now psychologically damaged, suffer from PTSD and should also be given pensions for their psychological trauma. Trauma they themselves are responsible for, with not a thought for the innocent victims they created.
“We must be very careful not to betray the innocent victims of the Troubles by keeping silent as others try to rewrite history.
“The Ulster Unionist Party is very clear - even if others are not – that what the IRA did was wrong then; it is wrong now; and it will remain wrong in the future. There will never be any excuse for their barbarity.”