Catholic cardinal: IRA dissidents shame Ireland
DUBLIN – IRA splinter groups still plotting gun and bomb attacks in Northern Ireland are shaming the people of Ireland and betraying the memory of its patriot dead, the leader of the island’s 4 million Catholics declared Wednesday.
Cardinal Sean Brady denounced Irish Republican Army dissidents during a state memorial service in honor of the approximately 450 people killed during Dublin’s 1916 Easter rebellion, a watershed event in Ireland’s fight for independence from Britain.
In the audience were President Mary McAleese, Prime Minister Brian Cowen, and grandchildren of the Irish rebels who seized control of key British government buildings in Dublin 93 years ago. The weeklong rebellion was militarily doomed — but fanned Irish hostility to Britain after rebel leaders were executed by firing squad.
Today’s rival IRA factions and the two major Republic of Ireland political parties all claim direct descendance from the 1916 rebels. But Brady said anyone committing or threatening violence today “as a means of achieving a united Ireland brings shame on that legitimate and still noble ideal.”
Brady said the dissidents’ most recent bloodshed — gun attacks in March that killed two unarmed British soldiers and a policeman — “were unjustified, morally repugnant and an offense to the ideals of the Easter proclamation.”
And he issued a direct appeal to young people thinking of joining either of the two splinter groups responsible, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA. Both underground grounds oppose the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 and its central achievement: a Catholic-Protestant government for Northern Ireland that includes former IRA leaders.
“Turn your back on those who betray the Irish people by killing or threatening those who serve the sovereign will of the Irish people through the institutions and principles of the Good Friday agreement,” Brady said. “I have no doubt that this is what those who died for Irish freedom in 1916 would ask you to do.”
