The former British defence minister, Mr Alan Clark, "got it right" in his controversial remarks on Northern Ireland, Mr Sammy Wilson of the Democratic Unionist Party has said. However, a Sinn Fein spokesman condemned the remarks as "racist".
Mr Clark told a fringe meeting at the Conservative conference on Tuesday: "The only solution for dealing with the IRA is to kill 600 people in one night - let the United Nations and Bill Clinton and everyone else make a scene - and it is over for 20 years."
Mr Wilson said yesterday: "Six hundred dead IRA men would have been preferable to the hundreds of innocent victims of terrorism which the policy of appeasement has produced." It was a "great pity" Mr Clark had not promoted this policy when the Tories were in government.
"The outcry by the politically-correct lobby should not detract from the correctness of Mr Clark's assessment. It is significant that he singles out the Americans as one of the barriers to a robust anti-terrorist campaign. They are and always will be a malign influence on Northern Ireland and one which all right-thinking people would do well to ignore," he said.
Sinn Fein's Northern chairman, Mr Gerry O hEara, said Mr Clark's comments were "a validation of our contention all along that successive Tory administrations - in one of which he was a cabinet minister - were driven in their Irish policy by an inherent racist bias.
"Mr Clark's words bring into clear focus the military mind-set which was applied to every consideration of British policy towards this conflict. It verbalises the racist thinking behind such policies as the brutalising of Irish political prisoners in English jails."