Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald has said there is "no comparison" between IRA violence during the troubles and gangland violence.
Ms McDonald was speaking in relation to the former Sinn Fein councillor Jonathon Dowdall who was recently sentenced to four years in prison for facilitating the murder of David Byrne in the Regency Hotel in 2016. He has since turned state witness in the Regency murder trial.
Dowdall was also convicted of interrogating, threatening, and waterboarding a man in January 2015. The Dublin Central TD previously said she was "profoundly shocked" when she found out about the former councillor's gangland crime association.
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Speaking to Newstalk, Ms McDonald said: "The first I knew of any of this was when he had been arrested for a different offense. I was very very shocked by that."
"I have to say, prior to that, he had been a person running a very successful business with very high-level contracts, employing a lot of people. Certainly there would've been no indication for me or for anybody else that he would be involved in this type of activity."
She added: "It's great to have the value of hindsight, but I simply had no awareness... As somebody who represents the north inner-city of Dublin and who has seen first hand the corrosive damage that 'gangland' has caused to communities, there is absolutely no comparison."
Ms McDonald said she is acutely aware of the "daily scourge" of gangland crime. And, according to her, there is "no comparison" between "things that happened in the course of a very long political conflict" and "ongoing challenge" of the "gangland crime epidemic".
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