Now and again one does speak about the true nature of their murder campaign. Which is usually given the euphemism.....'the armed struggle' Irish News 20/2/07
The words of P.S. O'Hegarty, a member of the IRB Supreme Council,who fought in the 1916 rising and who subsequently wrote a history of Sinn Fein.
''We adopted political assassination as a principle. ''We turned the whole thoughts and passions of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen,mostly half-educated and totally inexperienced,as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. ''We decided the moral law and said there was no law but the law of force,and the moral law answered to us.
''Every devilish thing we did against the British went full circle and boomeranged and smote us tenfold; and the culminating effect of the whole of it was a general moral weakening and a general degradation,a general cynicism and disbelief in either virtue or decency,in goodnesss or uprightness or honesty.''