TUV party hardliner Jack McKee refuses to back plans for memorial to Irish women convicted of witchcraft in 1711 as it would be ‘anti-God’

A born-again Christian councillor has objected to a memorial for eight Irish women convicted of witchcraft because he believes the plaque to remember them could become a “shrine to paganism”.

Jack McKee, a hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party, said he remained to be convinced that the women were not guilty of devil worship.

The author Martina Devlin, whose novel tells the story of the Islandmagee witch trials of 1711, the last convictions for witchcraft in Ireland, has been campaigning to clear the names of the eight. As part of her battle to have the women posthumously pardoned, Devlin managed to persuade officials on Larne borough council in Northern Ireland to erect a plaque in their memory at a visitors centre in Islandmagee on the East Antrim coast.

Devlin told the Guardian that even those accused of being witches in the notorious Salem witchcraft trials in colonial America were pardoned and declared innocent by 1711 – the same year eight poor women from Ulster Scots Presbyterian backgrounds stood trial for dabbling in black magic.

The author of The House Where It Happened described the Islandmagee women’s treatment as “a historic injustice that had to be righted”. But McKee, a veteran of Larne council for several decades, said: “I could not support the proposal because I believe it to be anti-God.”

The former Democratic Unionist party stalwart – who switched to the TUV after his one-time hero, Ian Paisley, decided to share power with Sinn Féin at Stormont – warned the council that he “could not tell whether or not the women had been rightly or wrongly convicted as he didn’t have the facts and was not going to support devil worship”.

Asked to reiterate his stance on the borough council, McKee later described the plaque as a potential “shrine to paganism” in Islandmagee.

Devlin, who has been told she would have to petition the Queen for a royal prerogative of mercy in order to clear the Islandmagee eight’s names, said: “These women were victims of prejudice and whispering games back in the 18th century, so I am shocked that in the 21st century some people object to correcting a miscarriage of justice.

“These were women who were poor, vulnerable and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence and so deserve to have their names cleared just like the innocent men, women and children accused at Salem, who were eventually pardoned.”

The eight mostly elderly women were convicted due to accusations from a local woman, 18-year-old Mary Dunbar, at the spring assizes of 1711. They escaped execution by hanging only because they were tried under Irish law, where first offenders of “witchcraft” were given a year in prison and fined. Had they been tried across the sea in Scotland, from where most Ulster Presbyterians came, all eight would have been hanged.

However, during their arrest the eight were set upon by a frenzied mob and one of the accused lost an eye. On release all of the women were ostracised from the Islandmagee community.