Seems like an over-reaction to something that happened 40 years ago. And actually, nothing really happened. As far as we can tell, he didnt go out and actually harm anyone. If he had, that would have been a totally different situation of course. Seems really stupid of him to bring it up though. Robin Roberts comments did not make sense to me either. She commented about how a black person would be hurt by those words. To me it is just the opposite: he admitted those feeling were wrong and claims he has changed.
I'd repeat what I said earlier in the thread - his (initial) acknowledgement of the wrongness of his feelings only focussed on the issue of vengeance, and barely touched on the second (and arguably greater) problem that he was engaging in a particularly scary form of collective blame.
He didn't, in the interview, express sufficient regret or remorse about
that part of his behaviour. He didn't show much sign he was aware it was an important and sensitive issue, as distinct from the general topic of vengeance-seeking. If he'd talked about that part of it more at the time his comments might have been much easier to defend.
The best defense I can think of for him is that the events he described are being interpreted in a different context to that in which they occurred. Especially in the US they seem to be seen in a context where race is the primary issue. In NI at that time black people were few in number and collective blame was part of the culture, and it predominantly involved groups of white people.
But one would have thought he'd have had enough experience of life and the world outside that context in the years since to have recontextualised that past, and hence concluded that he ought to be very careful how he tells that story, if at all. Someone ought to have pointed out the huge problem in how he thinks about his past to him in the intervening years, saving him from his own misjudgement.
Edit - I entirely agree with this article
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-liam-neeson-primal-urge-tell-us-about-racism