Sinn Féin presidential candidate Martin McGuinness has said he finds it “bemusing” that he is repeatedly asked questions about his IRA past when he is in the Republic.
Mr McGuinness, who has stepped aside as deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, claimed those who were asking the questions needed to understand that they had a role in peacemaking.
“What I do find I suppose bemusing [is] that when I come to Dublin you will find a number of people who themselves don’t understand that there is an art to peacemaking and that they too need to have a role in that instead of taking up confrontational positions,” Mr McGuinness said.
He said the relationship he had developed with the DUP’s Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson had “shocked the world”, and claimed he could “count on the fingers of one hand” the number of people in Northern Ireland who had asked him when he left the IRA. He was being interviewed by Pat Kenny on RTÉ Radio One this morning.
Mr McGuinness said there were things that the IRA did that he would under no circumstances ever attempt to justify. He said he had never hidden the fact that he was associated with the IRA in the early 1970s. “I am a united Irelander but I also live in the real world,” he added.
Mr McGuinness has repeatedly denied that he lured so-called IRA "informer'' Frank Hegarty back to Derry to his death in 1986. Asked about an article in today's Irish Times, in which Foreign Editor Peter Murtagh outlined an encounter with Mr McGuinness in a car outside the Hegarty home in Derry in 1986, Mr McGuinness said he did not recall the incident.
When it was put to Mr McGuinness that he told the Hegarty family it was safe for Mr Hegarty to return home, Mr McGuinness said that was not true.
“That is not true, and the Hegarty family know that. I could articulate in this interview exactly what happened, but if I did that it would be very hurtful and indeed very damaging to the Hegarty family,” he said. He claimed one member of the family knew what had happened, “and I am not going to put that person in a predicament”.
Speaking generally about his past, Mr McGuinness said people in Northern Ireland were not “obsessed by any of this”. He added: “The reality is that the past is a very, very dark place for everybody.”