Brendan McFarlane killed Irish people. That’s how he spent his adult years. He led an IRA bomb and machine gun-attack on the loyalist Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road, in which five people, four innocent civilians were murdered. There was no such thing as a “UVF” or “IRA” pub, merely a pub where terrorists chose to drink, and a publican had no say in the matter. So, terrorists who attacked a pub for its alleged paramilitary connections were fully aware that they would kill innocent civilians in the process. Two of the Bayardo dead were Linda Boyle, aged 17, and Joanne McDowell, 29. Did the Sinn Fein leader Marie Lou McDonald have the brutal, terrible deaths of these two young women in mind when she spoke of McFarlane as “a great patriot who lived his life for the freedom and unity of Ireland”?
Only by a Fenian graveside does one witness the heathen tones of the provisional movement. Gerry Kelly was doing the honours at the graveside of Brendan McFarlane. The latter’s exploits included the murder of seven Irish people, which clearly make him a Fenian hero. Kelly himself is not merely an unrepentant republican ex-terrorist, he is also a member of the Northern Ireland Police Board. This is both absurd and destabilising.
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