Redemptorist priest Fr Alex Reid is embroiled in a fresh political storm after he refused to accept that the Provisionals were involved in the £26 million Northern Bank robbery.
Fr Reid was last night forced to apologise after he likened the treatment of Catholics by Protestants to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis when he appeared at a public meeting at a Presbyterian church in Belfast.
Fr Reid, who along with Methodist minister the Rev Harold Good witnessed weapons decommissioning by the IRA two weeks ago, also angered unionists in a television interview by trying to explain why republican paramilitaries had carried out so-called punishment beatings and shootings in their areas.
He said tonight he believed the IRA's denial that it was involved in criminality and robbery like last year's £26 million Northern Bank heist.
"On that issue their leadership has denied it," he told BBC Northern Ireland's Hearts and Mindsprogramme. "I believe absolutely that they had no truck to do with it."
Fr Reid conceded that it was possible IRA members out to feather their own nests could be involved in criminality because every organisation could have individuals prepared to go to such lengths.
However he said he did not accept the IRA was a criminal organisation. "The whole spirit of that would be a betrayal of the whole meaning of the Republican movement," he said. "In their own minds they are fighting a war."
The decommissioning witness said he was also opposed to so-called punishment attacks carried out in nationalist neighbourhoods and he knew republicans who wanted an alternative.
However he tried to explain that the attacks occurred in the context of there being no police service in nationalist areas.
"There is an absence of a police force that has functionality in nationalist districts and people are going around who are raping, who are breaking into houses, who are joyriding and knocking people down, who are terrorising the elderly people. There are drugs of course. . . . Those people, whoever they are, they will do something about it themselves."
Fr Reid was criticised by Ulster Unionist Assembly member Fred Cobain and fellow DUP Policing Board member Ian Paisley jnr.
Mr Paisley said: "Fr Reid appears to have totally, utterly lost it. . . . His credibility has been blown to pieces and once again this expresses the folly of letting the IRA pick who should have witnessed decommissioning.
"He is in denial about criminality and if he is in that sort of denial there can be little credibility in what he says or what he claims to have seen," he said.
PA