McGuinness says IRA 'was wrong'

McGuinness has said he took part in the Bloody Sunday march

LONDON, England -- Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness has told a documentary that the Irish Republican Army has "done things in the past which were wrong."

In an interview on Saturday marking the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot dead 13 civil rights marchers in Londonderry, McGuinness recalls his part on that day.

The Mid Ulster MP, who is now Northern Ireland's Education Minister, has admitted he was the IRA's second in command in the city at the time of the killings.

He told the BBC: "The IRA have done things in the past which were wrong, and I have spoken up on countless occasions about that and so has (Sinn Fein President) Gerry Adams.

"But I haven't done anything that I am ashamed of."

He said "no evidence" has been produced that he was armed on January 30, 1972, or that the IRA fired the first shot on that day, when 13 demonstrators in a civil rights march were shot dead by British troops.

He said: "The only role I played on the day of Bloody Sunday was to go to the march and to share in the sadness and the sorrow.

"I was just like any of the other young people within the city and remember at that time the City of Derry, and the nationalist republican areas of the city, like the Bogside and the Creggan and the Brandywell were effectively at war with the British state."

The remarks sparked an angry response from Ulster Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson.

"For someone who is a self-confessed terrorist leader to say he has done nothing he is ashamed of only suggests he is an unreformed terrorist," Donaldson told the Press Association.

"Martin McGuinness should reflect on these remarks and come clean to the people of Northern Ireland and admit that what he did in the past was wrong, immoral and unjustified."

McGuinness is due to give evidence to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

He said: "I'm not running away from the past. I'm going to the Bloody Sunday Tribunal and I am prepared to face up to whatever process eventually may or may not flow from that, vis-a-vis the whole issue of reconciliation and truth."