Responding to Gerry Adams’s strongly worded attack on Traditional Unionists TUV vice-chair Keith Harbinson said:

“Traditional Unionists will take it as a badge of honour to have merited such an attack from the leader of the IRA’s political wing. When Adams praises other Unionists as “thinking” and “fair-minded” everyone knows who he is taking about, and why he says it.

“When I start getting praised by Adams for the way I think, I will know that my thinking is to the detriment of the Unionist cause.

“Yesterday in two of our Province’s newspapers Peter Robinson lauded the terrorist inclusive Executive and argued that it was delivering for our Province. How strange that Mr Adams would be such an enthusiastic cheerleader for that same system!

“Gerry Adams does not fear the DUP because they have rolled over to Republicans and granted Sinn Fein/IRA what they could never have achieved without the acquiesce of the Democratic Unionists – positions at the head of our government. It is because Adams knows TUV are intent on deposing Martin McGuinness as Joint First Minister that we have provoked this latest outburst.

“But let’s move on from what the Sinn Fein/IRA leader had to say about the one party opposed to Irish Republicanism (TUV) and examine what he said about Northern Ireland – a Province which, courtesy of pro-agreement Unionists, his party jointly governs.

“Adams describes Northern Ireland as a “sectarian state”.  This from a man who consistently refused to condemn the IRA – one of the most brutal sectarian murder gangs the world has ever seen. I don’t think the families of the ten Protestant workmen slaughtered by Sinn Fein’s military wing at Kingsmill will have much time for Adams’s lecture on sectarianism. Nor, for that matter, will the relatives of the twelve people killed in the IRA’s firebombing of the La Mon hotel. Or perhaps those attending a function run by the Irish Collie Club were a legitimate target?  With countless other examples available, I refuse to take a lecture on the subject of sectarianism from Adams or his ilk.  Sinn Fein/IRA set their face about the destruction of this country and the murder of thousands who sought to defend it on a purely sectarian basis and if they now feel they should have some guaranteed right to govern that same country, then it is they who live in fantasy land.

“Adams’s claim that “Catholics were the main target of this sectarianism and victims of state policies of discrimination” doesn’t square with the fact that the IRA killed more Roman Catholics than any other paramilitary group and far more than the legitimate forces of the state. His comments do nothing other than reveal his own blind bigotry and sectarianism and Republican’s continued hatred for Northern Ireland as a political entity. How then it must be argued can a party whose leader expounds such views be in government in this region of the United Kingdom.”