Donald Trump attended a Sinn Féin fundraising dinner in New York just months before the party’s allies in the Provisional IRA ended its ceasefire with a massive terror attack in London’s Canary Wharf district.

As controversy rages over the Republican presidential candidate’s demand that Muslims be barred from the United States to prevent Islamist terror attacks, footage has emerged of the tycoon shaking hands with Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.

For decades, Sinn Féin and the IRA were the political and military wings of the Irish republican movement, and the party was frequently accused of being an apologist for terror.

Trump and Adams met in the Essex Hotel in Manhattan in March 1995 at an event organised by the US-based Friends of Sinn Fein.

Guests, including Trump – currently the frontrunner in the race to become Republican presidential nominee – were charged a $200 entry fee to hear Adams speak about the Irish peace process.

But less than four months later the PIRA ended its ceasefire with a huge bomb in London’s Docklands on 9 February 1996. Two men working in a nearby newsagents were killed in the massive explosion, which caused £100m in damage to the Canary Wharf/South Quay district.



On his way to the New York fundraiser a few months earlier, Trump would

have seen a group of demonstrators protesting ongoing IRA violence, including victims of the 1993 Shankill bomb massacre in which 10 people died.

There were also protests from the relatives of Catholics who had been shot, beaten and exiled by the IRA even after the organisation declared its first ceasefire on 31 August 1994.

On the steps of the hotel, Alan McBride, whose wife was killed in the Shankill Road bombing, said: “He justifies the existence of the Provos, of Sinn Féin, of the IRA, claiming that they were fighting for a just and lasting peace. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t see how my wife’s murder helped IRA/Sinn Féin achieve peace. It’s hypocrisy. Gerry Adams is a hypocrite.”

As well as paying the $200 entry fee, business leaders and other donors, including a number of US celebrities, were asked to give donations to Friends of Sinn Féin.

During his speech, Gerry Adams even joked about Sinn Féin playing the “Trump card” from a podium close to where the businessman sat.

A spokesman for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the fallout from Trump’s comments that Muslims should be banned from entering the US continued on Wednesday evening. Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University announced that it is revoking the honorary doctorate it awarded to Donald Trump in 2010 “in recognition of his achievements as an entrepreneur and businessman”.

A spokesman for Robert Gordon university said: “In the course of the current US election campaign, Mr Trump has made a number of statements that are wholly incompatible with the ethos and values of the university. The university has therefore decided to revoke its award of the honorary degree.”

Anthony Baxter, the award-winning documentary maker who has made two films following Trump’s escapades in Scotland, also added his condemnation, saying Trump’s latest remarks expose his bullying behaviour to the world.

Baxter, whose films You’ve Been Trumped and A Dangerous Game document the environmental and community costs of the billionaire’s luxury golf development in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, and the subsequent struggles between the locals and Donald Trump and Scottish legal and governmental authorities, told the Guardian: “We already know golfers have chosen to boycott Trump’s Aberdeenshire course after watching You’ve Been Trumped because they were shocked by the bullying of local residents which was documented in the film. And his latest comments are simply an escalation of the bullying I’ve witnessed at first hand over the last half-decade.”

Baxter added: “The Menie Estate residents who opposed Mr Trump’s golf courses have endured years of intimidation – and now the world is beginning to wake up to what they’ve been going through – but on a much bigger scale. It remains to be seen if his call for a ban on Muslims entering the US will mean a wider boycott of his golf resorts in Scotland, and luxury developments elsewhere.”

• This article was amended on 10 December 2015. An earlier version said the event where Donald Trump and Gerry Adams met was in November 1995; it was in March that year.