Máiría Cahill says politics trumped morals in her case

Máiría Cahill, who was raped as a teenager by a senior IRA member, has said some people “checked their politics before they checked their morals” in response to her case.

Speaking at the launch of her book, Rough Beast: My Story and the Reality of Sinn Féin, she said people in west Belfast in 1997 “didn’t put their heads above the parapet”, for fear of falling foul of the community.

Ms Cahill alleged to police in 2010 that she had been raped by an IRA member in the late 1990s and said she was later subjected to an internal IRA “kangaroo court” investigation. She later came forward publicly to criticise how the IRA handled the matter, as well as criticising her treatment by Sinn Féin.

The Belfast woman was critical of how some people had reacted to her coming forward. “I think sometimes people check their politics before they check their morals and that was very unfortunate. Or should I say maybe sometimes people adjusted their moral compass to suit their politics.”

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Ms Cahill said she had been put in the “horrible” position of having to cut herself off from members of her wider family over what had happened to her. “That was a necessity because obviously, you know, we are a republican family and some people put their politics before unfortunately the family relationship.”

[ Rough Beast by Máiría Cahill: angry, traumatised, no-nonsense view of IRA’s inside workings ]

In reference to a 1995 comment by former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in relation to the Provisional IRA, Ms Cahill said: “I haven’t gone away you know, either”.

Ms Cahill, who was previously a senator for the Labour Party and later a councillor for the SDLP, said sexual abuse was a “disgusting breach of the human psyche”.

She said while writing the book she had to deal with “testy” lawyers for the publisher, “who wanted us to remove the words ‘IRA’ from the book”.

Members of the Labour Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, including Tánaiste Micheál Martin, attended the Dublin launch in Hodges Figgis bookshop on Wednesday.

Commenting on the controversial chant of ‘Ooh ah up the Ra’, Ms Cahill said she felt it was “hurtful” to victims of violence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, as well as the unionist community. “It isn’t simply a harmless chant, it is something which no matter what the reason for being sung, strikes to the core and hurts those that are nursing broken hearts.”