Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s tribute to former senior Provisional IRA member Brendan “Bik” McFarlane has been described as “nauseating” by former minister for justice Charlie Flanagan.
McFarlane (74), who was the IRA commander in the Maze prison during the 1981 hunger strikes, died last week following a short illness.
[ Who was Bik McFarlane? The IRA figure linked to notorious kidnappingOpens in new window ]
Ms McDonald said she learned of his death with great sadness, describing him as “a giant of Irish republicanism” who was “an important influence on the development of the peace process”.
She added that his life was about “activism”, the “uplift of working people” and “the nationhood of Ireland”.
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Ms McDonald also said “we have lost a great patriot who lived his life for the freedom and unity of Ireland”.
Mr Flanagan, a former Fine Gael TD, criticised the tribute, saying McFarlane was “directly and heavily involved in vicious sectarian crimes”.
He said: “Heaping praise on such a controversial figure demonstrates the distance between Sinn Féin and the acceptance of the rule of law.”
Sinn Féin declined to offer a comment in response to Mr Flanagan’s remarks.
McFarlane was imprisoned at the Maze for his part in a 1975 IRA attack at a pub in the Protestant Shankill Road area of Belfast in which five people were killed.
He and two others carried out a bomb and gun attack on the pub they suspected of being used by UVF members.
Two people were shot dead outside the pub while three more died in the subsequent explosion, which injured dozens of people.
Mc Farlane was among 38 IRA inmates who escaped the Maze in Co Antrim in September 1983.
He would later be named by gardaí as suspected of participating in the November 1983 kidnapping of businessman Don Tidey.
Mr Tidey was snatched outside his south Dublin home and held captive for more than three weeks in a wooded hideaway while ransom demands were issued.
A trainee garda, Gary Sheehan (23), from Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, and Patrick Kelly (35), an Army private, were shot dead during Mr Tidey’s rescue that December near Ballinamore, Co Leitrim.
McFarlane was arrested in Amsterdam in 1986, extradited to Northern Ireland and released on parole from the Maze in 1997.
Gardaí decided not to pursue the case against McFarlane over the Tidey kidnapping while he was still in jail in the North.
He was arrested in Co Louth in January 1998.
A decade-long legal battle followed.
McFarlane was cleared in Dublin’s Special Criminal Court in 2008 of false imprisonment and firearms possession in relation to the kidnapping of Mr Tidey.
In September 2010, the European Court of Human Rights ruled he was entitled to monetary relief from the State for the delays in bringing him to trial.
