As part our ongoing investigation into the Labour leadership’s links with the IRA, The Sunday Times found that Diane Abbott explicitly backed victory for the IRA in an interview with a pro-republican journal.

Abbott, who will become home secretary if Labour wins the election, said in the 1984 interview that Ireland “is our struggle — every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed.” She said she did not regard herself as British.

She endorsed violence, saying: “I am not saying that women are innately peaceful and non-violent and that we don’t fight back. Of course we do and should.”

She criticised Northern Ireland as an “enclave of white supremacist ideologies.” Asked about Labour’s official policy of seeking Unionist consent, she replied: “Oh God! There are so many analogies if only [Clive] Soley [Labour frontbench spokesman on Ireland at the time] would look at Britain’s colonial past… Should we have waited to win the consent of the white racists in Zimbabwe?”

The interview was published in Labour and Ireland, the journal of the Labour Committee on Ireland (LCI), a small pro-republican support group in the party that operated at the height of the IRA’s armed struggle in the 1980s and early 1990s. Abbott and Corbyn spoke at several LCI meetings.

LCI organised many events with Sinn Fein, including a controversial fringe meeting with party leader Gerry Adams and Corbyn at the 1989 Labour conference in Brighton, near the Grand Hotel, which was bombed by the IRA in 1984, killing five people.

Full story in today’s Sunday Times, but below is the original copy of the interview, which we located in an Irish archive.