A County Leitrim Councillor has refused to apologise for repeatedly using the n-word at a local meeting this week.
Mr Guckian insists his comments have been taken out of context and are being used to distract from the important issue of road repair he was trying to highlight.
Councillors expressed their outrage at the Carrick-on-Shannon Municipal meeting last Monday.
He used the highly-offensive slur when referring to people in Leitrim being treated as second-class citizens, saying: “We are certainly not n*****s like in the eyes of the south of the United States, that is long gone.”
Cllr Guckian was asked to withdraw the racist word, but he refused to do so.
The independent councilor told Ocean FM: “What I said was far from a racial slur, there was no slur whatsoever intended but the very opposite and I don’t know how any person could misinterpret what I said.
"I was talking about downtrodden people in the United States, I referred to ourselves as downtrodden here, where our interests are being totally ignored by council officials and indeed the councilors who are elected by these very people.”
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