Disarmament priest: IRA had no truck with bank robbery

A Catholic priest who witnessed the completion of IRA disarmament was tonight embroiled in a fresh political storm after he refused to accept that the Provisionals were involved in the £26m (€37m) Northern Bank robbery.

Redemptorist priest Father Alex Reid, who along with Methodist minister the Rev Harold Good witnessed weapons decommissioning by the IRA two weeks ago, also angered unionists in a television interview broadcast in Northern Ireland tonight by trying to explain why republican paramilitaries had carried out so-called punishment beatings and shootings in their areas.

Fr Reid was last night forced to apologise after he likened the treatment of Catholics by Protestants to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis when he appeared at a public meeting at a Presbyterian church in Belfast.

He said tonight he believed the IRA’s denial that it was involved in criminality and robbery like last year’s £26m Northern Bank heist.

“On that issue their leadership has denied it,” he told BBC Northern Ireland’s Hearts and Minds programme.

“I believe absolutely that they had no truck to do with it.”

Fr Reid conceded that it was possible IRA members out to feather their own nests could be involved in criminality because every organisation could have individuals prepared to go to such lengths.

However he said he did not accept the IRA was a criminal organisation.

“The whole spirit of that would be a betrayal of the whole meaning of the Republican movement,” he said.

“In their own minds they are fighting a war.”

The decommissioning witness said he was also opposed to so-called punishment attacks carried out in nationalist neighbourhoods and he knew republicans who wanted an alternative.

However he tried to explain that the attacks occurred in the context of there being no police service in nationalist areas.

“There is an absence of a police force that has functionality in nationalist districts and people are going around who are raping, who are breaking into houses, who are joy-riding and knocking people down, who are terrorising the elderly people. There are drugs of course … Those people, whoever they are, they will do something about it themselves.”

Fr Reid was criticised by Ulster Unionist Assembly member Fred Cobain and his fellow DUP Policing Board member, Ian Paisley junior.

Mr Paisley said: “Fr Reid appears to have totally, utterly lost it.

“His credibility has been blown to pieces and once again this expresses the folly of letting the IRA pick who should have witnessed decommissioning.

“He is in denial about criminality and if he is in that sort of denial there can be little credibility in what he says or what he claims to have seen.

“If he had not made the Nazi comment last night, these comments alone would have struck at his credibility.”

Mr Cobain described Fr Reid’s latest comments as shocking.

“No one has the right to take a child up an entry (alleyway) and shoot it in the hands, arms or the feet,” the North Belfast Assembly member said.

“No one has the right to crucify someone in that way to make a point.

“There is no justification for this type of action and people should not be trying to even explain it. It is wrong and Fr Reid should know that. He is a priest.

“The danger of comments like these is that they are used to legitimise this type of activity.”

Fr Reid’s comments on the treatment of Catholics at last night’s public meeting involving his fellow decommissioning witness, the Rev Harold Good, were today criticised by Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain in the House of Commons, who noted the priest’s apology.

Mr Good and Fr Reid both explained that those comments were made in the heat of the moment after bitter exchanges with some in the audience.

Based in Clonard Monastery, Fr Reid was a pivotal figure in efforts to bring the IRA into the peace process and helped set up talks between Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and former SDLP leader John Hume, which brought republicans in from the political cold.

He has also recently been involved in efforts to bring about a peace process involving Basque separatists.

In one of the most gruesome images of the North’s Troubles, he was photographed administering the last rites to one of two British army corporals killed by a mob in west Belfast after their car drove into a cortege at the funeral of an IRA member in March 1988.