DUP MP Gregory Campbell has defended the comments he made to President Catherine Connolly, saying that her speech in Derry on her first State visit to Northern Ireland "did not attempt to reach across the divide".
It comes after he was filmed yesterday telling President Connolly "you're in our country" and warned her against "rewriting the past" on her visit to Co Derry.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with David McCullagh, Mr Campbell said President Connolly’s Belfast address on Wednesday was a "reasonable attempt at being balanced" and a "fair enough opportunity for her to reach out across different communities".
However, he said "that wasn’t the case" in Derry.
He said Ms Connolly coming to Derry was "exclusively an opportunity that she took to appeal to nationalist Londonderry, not to unionists".
Mr Campbell said there were references to Bloody Sunday but "no reference whatever to Londonderry".
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"She was speaking on the West Bank (in Derry), that’s a population of 60,000 people, 95% of them are nationalists. The reason for that is because the IRA threatened, terrorised and murdered unionists way back in the day, at the start of the Troubles but no mention or reference of that whatsoever," he said.
"She said in her speech that she was going to meet the families of the Bloody Sunday victims, but she never mentioned that she was going to meet the families of many of the police officers and soldiers who died on the very ground that she was speaking on."
He said Ms Connolly talked about tragedies that "affect one community but not tragedies that affected the other".
"If you do that, you cannot rationally say this was an effort to reach out to both sections of the community, it wasn’t," he said.
President Connolly concluded her three-day visit to Northern Ireland by meeting youth groups in Derry this morning.
She met groups from Donegal Youth Service, cross-community group Reach and representatives of Derry and Strabane District council.
Campbell willing to meet Connolly at Áras
Mr Campbell said he hopes "we can all learn from this" and that he was glad Ms Connolly responded in the way that she did, describing her reply as "courteous".
On whether a private conversation over a public confrontation would have sufficed with Ms Connolly instead, Mr Campbell replied: "How would I have been able to do that when I didn’t know until I heard the speech what she was going to say."
"Having heard the speech, the nature of it, I thought it would be remiss of me not to mention that," he said.
Mr Campbell referenced the late Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland and to Croke Park in 2011.
He asked: "What would the reaction have been in the Republic if the Queen had went to Croke Park and on that spot, had made reference to the bravery of her predecessor soldiers, 100 years ago but never mentioned the fact that people in Croke Park died as a result of some of the altercations between soldiers and people in the Republic at Croke Park?"
He was asked how would he feel if the tables were reversed and someone confronted the British King Charles in the same way he approached President Connolly.
Mr Campbell said if King Charles "deliberated on a partisan approach" he believes that person "would have been perfectly entitled to do as I did in a perfectly reasonable, calm and respectful fashion, point out the disparity".
"Especially when the previous day, in a different location, there was an attempt to reach across the divide and there was none yesterday," he said.
He said he did not think it was disrespectful in any way to "point that out in a calm, dignified and respectful fashion".
"You certainly couldn’t argue that the speech contained an effort to try to reach across the divide," he said.
Mr Campbell added that he would welcome an opportunity to discuss this further with President Connolly and would be willing to meet her in Áras an Uachtaráin.
