UNIONIST MINISTERS have called on Taoiseach Enda Kenny to meet Protestant families whose loved ones were killed by the IRA along the Border and to acknowledge and apologise for the alleged failure by previous governments to stop the murders.
Ulster Unionist Minister Danny Kennedy and Democratic Unionist Party Minister Arlene Foster said the Government must examine whether there was official “collusion” during the late 1960s and 1970s that permitted the IRA to kill and injure hundreds of Protestants in Border counties.
Fermanagh Assembly member and Minister for Enterprise Ms Foster, after meeting Mr Kenny on the periphery of yesterday’s North-South Ministerial Council meeting in Armagh, said unionists recognised there was good security co-operation along the Border.
“However, we firmly believe – and it is up to him to rebut that belief, and we will see if the does – that in the past, people were shooting and murdering citizens of Northern Ireland and 20 minutes later they were sitting in a pub south of the Border having a pint.”
The meeting was arranged after the Taoiseach, on his two-day visit to Northern Ireland, reiterated Government support for a public inquiry into the 1989 UDA murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.
Ms Foster said the Government should be reminded “that we certainly feel” governments of the 1960s and 1970s could have done a lot more to stop “the campaign of genocide that was happening in Fermanagh, Tyrone, south Armagh and indeed Londonderry as well”.
The murder conviction rate in Fermanagh was a “woeful” 3 per cent because the killers escaped justice by crossing the Border.
