SINN FÉIN FINANCE spokesperson Pearse Doherty has said that he has “no reason to disbelieve” Gerry Adams when the party president says he was never in the IRA.
Doherty was speaking to Today FM last night in the wake of Monday’s ‘The Disappeared’ programme broadcast on RTÉ and the BBC.
The programme contained allegations that Adams “gave the order” for the abduction, killing and burial of widow and mother-of-10 Jean McConville. The Louth TD said he had “no act or part” in the disappearance of McConville.
The programme raised new questions about Adams’s past associations with the IRA though he has consistently denied ever being a member of the republican organisation.
Doherty said that the details of the 15 people who were ‘disappeared’ by the IRA during the 1970s, that were described in detail by victims’ relatives in the programme, were “absolutely appalling”.
“You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the documentary,” he said, adding that families of the victims suffered a double tragedy in that some of them never had the bodies of their loved ones returned to them.
He said that the IRA’s ‘disappearing’ of people in the during the Troubles “wasn’t acceptable”.
Pressed by Matt Cooper on The Last Word as to whether he believed Adams’s claim about never being in the IRA, Doherty said: ”I’ve no reason to disbelieve him on that issue and I think most people have made their minds up one way or another on that issue.”
Meanwhile, a delegation of Labour TDs is to meet with families of the Disappeared in Belfast later today.
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