CLAIMS have previously been made that some republicans used the Troubles to shield members of paramilitary organisations involved in child abuse.
In the most high-profile case, Gerry Adams' brother Liam, pictured, was sentenced to 16 years in prison last year for raping and abusing his daughter, Aine, when she was a child.
Aine and her mother reported the abuse to the Sinn Fein president in 1987 and they had several meetings and also confronted Liam Adams together.
The Sinn Fein leader was criticised for only telling police in 2009 that his brother had confessed to him nine years earlier that he had abused Aine. In his book, Gerry Bradley's Life in the IRA, the IRA man claimed some paedophiles joined the paramilitary group "to enjoy the protection of being in the 'Ra". Bradley, the IRA's youngest ever battalion commander said the organisation "didn't deal with all the chancers and criminals the way they should have and over the years there were plenty of them".
The case of three sisters who were targeted by a paedophile who was an on-the-run IRA man in Dublin in the seventies backs up 'Whitey' Bradley's claim.
In 2008 they told The Irish News that when their parents informed the IRA leadership about the abuse in 1975 the man was expelled from the organisation and they were told not to talk about it.
One of the sisters said two women had come to question them and then the IRA held a "court".
A relative of a former senior IRA member, meanwhile, accused the IRA of helping an alleged rapist move from Belfast to Donegal.
The woman said she reported her abuser to the IRA and had a series of fruitless meetings with Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and with IRA figures about the matter.