Speaking ahead of an event to mark the forty eighth anniversary of the Kingsmill massacre TUV Cusher councillor Keith Ratcliffe said:
“Even by the brutal standards of the blood soaked IRA Kingsmills stands out as a particularly savage and callous act. Here were men returning from their place of work taken out and shot because of their religion. Their only crime was that they were Protestants.
“While Dublin plans to take the UK to the European Court over its legacy plans the Republic has failed to live up to its obligations. No case more graphically illustrates this than Kingsmill where southern authorities have repeatedly stymied attempts to get to the truth about what happened that dreadful day.
“It is worth remembering too that to this day the Provisional movement have never admitted carrying out the massacre. That hasn’t, of course, prevented Sinn Fein from grossly insulting victims by naming a play park after Raymond McCreesh, an IRA terrorist arrested with a rifle used in the Kingsmills Massacre. Victims well remember too how Barry McElduff, then a Sinn Fein MP and someone who went on to serve as chairman of Fermanagh and Omagh Council, set out to insult them on the anniversary of the slaughter.
“Now we have a growing clammer within Unionism to get into an executive headed by Sinn Fein. Mrs O’Neill frequently claims that she would be a “First Minister for all” if Unionists were foolish enough to elevate her to that position. It should be a basic requirement of any Unionist who would even contemplate such folly that she would require her party colleagues in Newry, Mourne and Down to rename this park before she is even considered for a position which, after all, would see her hold an office which gives her ministerial responsibility for victims.
“Rather than see such, innocent victims have been insulted again by the proposal that they should be lumped along with victims makers in receiving a £10,000 payment. Such a suggestion from the so-called “Victims Commissioner” has, far from building reconciliation deepened division. There is no parallel between the men lined up on the side of the road that night 48 years ago and those who went out with the intent to take life. The very suggestion is repugnant.”