IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY Sinn Fein hopes to repair image after bar fight that led to slaying

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Sinn Fein, the political party linked to the outlawed Irish Republican Army, opened its annual conference Saturday with attempts to defuse a spiraling crisis caused by IRA members getting in a bar fight that led to a killing.
The slaying in January outside a Belfast pub, critics say, illustrates the IRA's descent into thuggish crime after the Northern Ireland peace process had deprived the group of legitimate underground struggle. Compounding the political damage for Sinn Fein, the victim was a fellow Roman Catholic.
Sinn Fein invited four sisters of the victim, Robert McCartney, to the conference. They sat in the front row as party leader Gerry Adams said the killers should turn themselves in and confess.
They should "admit what they did in a court of law," Adams said. "That's the only decent thing for them to do."
Adams said he wanted to assure the entire McCartney family, the man's fiancee and his two young children, "that we are on their side."
The four sisters, who have led a high-profile campaign to draw attention to the IRA's intimidation of witnesses to the Jan. 30 murder, listened to the speech with grim expressions and looking down at their feet.
They left the conference saying they were not close to satisfied. They noted that none of 72 potential witnesses has given police a statement identifying the attackers, although their names are common knowledge in the McCartneys' Belfast neighborhood of Short Strand, a traditional IRA base.