Yesterday’s heated exchanges in the Dáil between Enda Kenny and Gerry Adams marked the clearest sign yet that the gravity of the Mairia Cahill situation is registering with the Sinn Fein party leadership, and Adams in particular. The questions mount and the denials of the past week have at times been made to look less than robust in the face of intensifying scrutiny. One major concern now is the allegation that the IRA moved sexual abusers across the border into the south. For Sinn Féin, the building pressure is better seen as more of a political football and a witch hunt.

Speaking to Newstalk Lunchtime today, Sinn Féin Justice Spokesperson Padraig MacLochlainn insisted Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin have been unfairly judged by a public and media who have taken the version of events told by Cahill at face value, while also rejecting the Taoiseach’s suggestion that the IRA moved abusers into the Republic.

MacLochlainn said that alleged sex abusers would not have been moved to another part of Ireland, but rather ‘expelled’ to somewhere outside the country.

“What the Taoiseach insinuated yesterday was that people guilty or allegedly guilty of sex abuse were moved by the IRA to safe-houses. That’s a very different thing to being expelled. I always understood it was from the country, that was my understanding.”

“At that time alleged sex offenders were sometimes shot or expelled. That was entirely unacceptable.

“But in the society at that time there was no police service for 40% of the population, there was nobody you could go to with those situations and that was the tragedy at that time,” MacLochlainn said, echoing the argument put forward by Gerry Adams in a blog post last weekend.

Jonathan Healy asked MacLochlainn if it was wrong to place Maíria Cahill – then a 16 year old rape victim – in the company of her abuser for a “kangaroo court” sitting.

MacLochlainn said it was wrong, "if it happened".

“If it happened as she said, that would be outrageous, that would be reprehensible.”

MacLochlainn insisted that neither he, nor anyone else, was fit to judge on the matter of the case’s details. He said the matter is one for the courts, not for the media to judge on.

“You, nor me, with all due respects Jonathan, are capable of judging on these matters. Nor is any journalist, nor is any media commentator, nor is any politician. The appropriate people to deal with these allegations are the police, are the court services in the north.

“I happen to believe that she was the victim of abuse and she has been traumatised by that and I am genuinely empathetic, I think like any right thinking person on this island.

“Now I do not accept at all the suggestion that she’s made that Sinn Fein covered up abuse or the allegations that she made about the Sinn Féin people that she’s named,” MacLochlainn said.

MacLochlainn argued that this has effectively been a trial by media for Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams, and rejected the suggestion that sex offenders were “moved across anywhere” by the IRA.

MacLochlainn called on anyone with any information about any such crimes to contact the relevant authorities, on either side of the border.

“There were tens of thousands of men and women in the IRA. Some of them must have been abusers and it is likely that some of these instances were not dealt with appropriately and people were victims and suffered. And I’m saying to them, please come forward, because if there was anything as suggested people should be brought to justice, it was reprehensible,” MacLochlainn said.

Listen to the full interview, plus analysis of the overall situation from Newstalk’s Political Editor Shane Coleman, via the player below