Senator John McCain yesterday described the IRA offer to shoot the alleged killers of Robert McCartney as "bizarre and repugnant" and a defining factor in ending any support for the IRA in the United States.
In an interview in his Senate office, Mr McCain called for the disbandment of the IRA saying "we have had enough".
The Arizona Republican was speaking before receiving a distinguished leadership award at the annual American Ireland Fund dinner in Washington last night attended by among others the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and the McCartney sisters.
Northern Ireland leaders should take great inspiration from the courage of the McCartney sisters, said Mr McCain. "Frankly it's interesting to me that some of the strongest supporters of Sinn Féin here in Congress have taken a pretty strong position concerning the activities of the IRA, the killing, the robbery.
"I think there is a sea change. This is the first time since 1995 that Ted Kennedy has refused to meet with Gerry Adams. No more staunch a supporter than Peter King came out with some very strong statements.
"Quite frankly I hope the IRA gets the message because we just sort of have had enough.
"I thought that the most bizarre of anything I had heard in recent years was the offer of the IRA to kill these guys. To make an offer like that shows the IRA is way out of touch with general public opinion both in the US and in Ireland. What can they be thinking? An offer like that would be reviewed as repugnant by any educated civilised group.
"Gerry Adams is very smart, very articulate, very in tune with public opinion, he's a very consummate politician. I hope that he recognises and tells his friends that they have lost all public support here, that the time has come to disband the IRA, that we should not have a private army. I'm not saying that the problems of the peace process are all Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness's fault. There were certainly problems on the Protestant side. But at this point in history it's up to them to move the process forward."
Mr McCain, a presidential candidate in 2000 and tipped to run again in 2008 for the White House, also said that while he understood the opposition in Ireland to the war in Iraq, he believed Irish people and other Europeans "may be on the wrong side of history".
"I would say to the Irish people that they may be viewing a sea change in the history of the Middle East in that democracy and freedom is spreading throughout that area," he said. "Coupled with significant progress in the Israeli-Palestinian issue, most objective observers would argue that the success of elections in Iraq was one of the catalysts that moved this process forward. Lot of things could go wrong but you see Mubarak calling for free elections, the Saudis saying that the Syrians have to get out of Lebanon, the demonstrations by the Lebanese saying 'Syrians out'. I believe you are seeing the winds of change blow across the Middle East."
He said that a number of Democrats in Congress were already saying that "President Bush may have been right." The difference between the Iraqi situation and the Vietnam war, said Mr McCain, who was a North Vietnam prisoner of war, "is that with the free elections in Iraq we changed the dynamic from insurgents versus the US to insurgents versus their own elected government. In Vietnam the South Vietnamese never viewed their government in Saigon as legitimate. It was always one general after another and they had a national hero in Ho Chi Min.
"In Iraq you've got a bunch of bad people who are killing innocent Iraqis and I don't think time is on the side of insurgents. The key will be casualties. We have been in Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, lot of countries for a long time and we don't sustain casualties so Americans are pretty happy."
When people read of American soldiers being killed every day "it wears down support and that's the big danger. The key to that is the assumption of responsibility for security and police by Iraqis and it is still not clear despite what the administration says that we are making enough progress in training and equipping the Iraqi army."