Rose McGowan’s IRA claim causes outrage

Rose McGowan, the Hollywood actress best known for her stunts in last year's Quentin Tarantino flick Grindhouse (left in picture), may come to regret the remarks she made at the Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday. While being interviewed about her latest film, Fifty Dead Men Walking, in which she plays an IRA operative, McGowan - who is Italian born but has an Irish father - blithely announced that she would have been a terrorist if she had lived in Northern Ireland at the time of the 'troubles'. "I imagine, had I grown up in Belfast, I would 100 per cent have been in the IRA," she said.

Her remarks have gone down very badly with Marty McGartland, the former IRA infiltrator on whose story the film was based. He was recruited by the RUC Special Branch to infiltrate the IRA, and had to be given a new identity when he was discovered as a mole. This did not prevent an assassination attempt in 1999, when he was shot six times at his London home by two men, but survived.

On reading the actress's remarks, McGartland contacted The First Post to express his outrage: "She must have taken leave of her senses. Can't she see that such remarks are incredibly insensitive to the families of victims of the IRA? She clearly doesn't know anything about Northern Ireland."

McGowan isn't the first Hollywood actor to get into deep water over IRA sympathies. Mickey Rourke's career was not helped when he allegedly donated part of his earnings from the movie Francesco to the IRA in 1994.

As for McGartland, this is just the latest spat over the release of the film. When the producers bought the rights to his book he was led to believe the film would stick closely to his story. That, he says, did not happen and for some time he held up the movie's release with a lawsuit. Eventually, the makers of the film, which also stars Jim Sturgess and Sir Ben Kingsley, agreed to run disclaimers and paid him $37,500 in settlement.

The film's director, Kari Skogland, said: "He's a scrapper and he wanted to make sure that we knew what he was concerned with. So we listened and we heard, and we came to a settlement."

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