A CATHOLIC woman from the Belfast streets where the IRA was born last night bluntly told Irish America to abandon its romantic view of the armed struggle for Irish unity.

Directly challenging the IRA’s reason to exist, Catherine McCartney said: “The struggle in terms of what it was ten years ago is now over. We are now dealing with criminal gangs who use the cloak of romanticism around the IRA to murder people on the streets and walk away from it.

“We want the people in America to know that any romantic vision they have of the struggle should now be dispelled.”

Ms McCartney, one of five sisters whose brother, Robert, was murdered, they say, by the IRA after a bar-room row, was speaking as they arrived in the United States for a series of meetings with leading American policitians with Irish links and a visit to the White House.

The women’s comments and the welcome they are receiving represents the gravest challenge so far to the IRA’s primacy in its Belfast heartlands.

A decade ago Ms McCartney’s words might have guaranteed her a death sentence, or exile at best, from the family’s home in the staunchly republican Short Strand, where a stand taken by several IRA men against a loyalist mob 35 years ago is regarded by the Provisionals as the starting point of their history.

The sisters’ arrival in America comes as Sinn Fein and its military wing came under unprecedented pressure at home and from formerly sympathetic Irish Americans to take the final step in the peace process by disbanding the IRA.

The McCartneys will tomorrow be fêted by President Bush at the White House for St Patrick’s Day celebrations from which Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, has pointedly been excluded. They hope to highlight their brother’s case and ask Mr Bush “if he can do all that he can in helping to have the murderers . . . brought to court”.

Mr McCartney’s five sisters — Paula, Catherine, Gemma, Claire and Donna, and his fiancée Bridgeen Hagans — insisted that they were motivated by nothing other than their brother's brutal killing as they prepared to meet Mr Bush.

Catherine McCartney said that their intention was to make influential politicians aware that people could be murdered and as long as they did not belong to an organisation, no one was accountable. “We are highlighting that this started off as intimidation and has now taken a sinister twist into an area of secrecy,” she said. “There is an implication that someone is pulling our strings but the only person pulling our strings is Robert.”

Asked about the warning issued to the family by Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, to stay out of party politics, Paula McCartney said that they would not be used as a political football. “We are women who can speak for ourselves and we know that lots of people want to use us.”

The sisters said that their trip would only be worthwhile if those responsible for their brother’s murder were arrested before they returned home.

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