On the killing itself, the comments of our local TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin are worth repeating:
Whatever circumstances are behind the attack there can be no justification for this type of violence. I strongly condemn the attack which took place in my own constituency and urge that anyone with information relating to the murder go to the gardaí immediately.I would caution against a rush to judgement about the perpetrators. Just because the family believes republicans were involved doesn't mean they were. See my previous post on Joe Rafferty's murder, and remember also the case of Gareth O'Connor, for whose disappearance the IRA was widely blamed until it was revealed that he had been touting to the PSNI on his comrades in the Real IRA.
Whoever was responsible, though, it should be obvious that - after Paul Quinn's family - the last people who would have wanted anything like this to happen are Sinn Féin. Whereas some of our opponents, in the media and on other web forums, seem to be nearly wetting themselves with glee.
For the sake of everyone and everything involved, I hope this is resolved as quickly as it can be, and with a minimum of political point-scoring.
2 comments:
The family was not only expressing a view. Fact: Paul Quinn was threatened by more than one known Provo. Fact: the wife of one of them came to his house waving a hammer and said Quinn would be found by the road in a black bag. Fact: an innocent intermediary passed along an exiling order which was very explicit in the name of the Provisional IRA. Fact: within a couple of days he was battered to death. There is also a lot of powerful circumstancial evidence, not least the fact that his killing involved up to 20 people counting scouts and lookouts.
With all due respect, and I mean that quite literally, putting the word "Fact:" before an allegation doesn't make it anything more than an allegation. Maybe those things happened and maybe they didn't, but I'm not going to assume that because some people, most of whom happen to be our political opponents or anonymous internet posters, said they happened means that they did. There were a lot of so-called "fact:"s thrown about in relation to the other two cases I mentioned, which were actually no such thing.
What I'm hearing, and this is being said privately by people who would know, is that the murder really was a purely criminal matter with no involvement from anyone in our movement. The burden of proof is on those who say otherwise.
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