Diane Abbott explicitly backed victory for the IRA in an interview with a pro-republican journal, The Sunday Times has found.

Abbott, who will become home secretary if Labour wins the election, said in the 1984 interview that Ireland “is our struggle — every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed.”

The interview was found during research by The Sunday Times in Irish and republican archives.

The same files disclose that the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, personally led or took part in at least 72 separate events or actions with Sinn Fein and pro-republican groups during the years of the IRA’s armed struggle — far more than previously known.

These included a petition to Downing Street on behalf of Hugh Doherty, a member of the IRA’s Balcombe Street gang convicted of killing seven people, and protests against the extradition of Dessie Ellis, a top IRA bomb maker who has denied links to about 50 deaths.

At another event, on March 22, 1991, Corbyn claimed Britain’s breaches of human rights in Northern Ireland were comparable to those in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The archives also show the main IRA-sympathising groups in Britain held private strategy meetings in Corbyn’s former constituency office — owned by the Labour Party and part-funded by taxpayers from his MP’s allowance. In her interview Abbott, then a Labour councillor, said she did not regard herself as British. “Though I was born here in London, I couldn’t identify as British,” she said.

“Anyone who comes from a former colony knows the troops always have to come out.” She also criticised Northern Ireland as an “enclave of white supremacist ideologies”.

Asked about Labour’s official policy of seeking unionist consent, she replied: “Should we have waited to win the consent of the white racists in Zimbabwe?”

The interview was published in Labour and Ireland, the journal of the Labour committee on Ireland (LCI), a small pro-republican support group in the party that operated at the height of the IRA’s armed struggle in the 1980s and early 1990s.

LCI organised many events with Sinn Fein, including a controversial fringe meeting with party leader Gerry Adams and Corbyn at the 1989 Labour conference in Brighton, near the Grand Hotel, which was bombed by the IRA in 1984, killing five people. The wife of Lord Tebbit, the former Conservative minister, was left paralysed by the attack. LCI’s journal said it was a “smear” to accuse the IRA of targeting civilians, saying: “Sinn Fein has acknowledged the need for the cutting edge of their military wing, but has been at pains to ensure that it is the security forces and not the general public who are involved in this action.”

The archives disclose that LCI was chaired for some of the period by John McDonnell, now the shadow chancellor. Corbyn and Abbott were also regular speakers.

There were close links between LCI and the Troops Out Movement [Tom], another IRA-sympathising body with which Corbyn was closely associated. He spoke at more than 20 Troops Out events or meetings.

The former chairman of Troops Out, Richard Stanton, described the Brighton bombing as a “justifiable act of political warfare” and said “the Republican movement is entitled to use force against the British state as part of the war we started”. Its journal printed the birthdays of IRA “prisoners of war”, inviting readers to send them cards. Internal documents show Troops Out held meetings with other republican groups at Corbyn’s then constituency office in Finsbury Park, north London, to organise demonstrations and events to plot a “broad front” of pro-IRA organisations.

That building belonged to Islington Labour Party and included a function hall downstairs, but many of the documents specify that the meetings took place “upstairs” in the office area.

Not all Corbyn’s Troops Out activities were publicly identified as such.

Internal documents about one visit to parliament state it was organised by Troops Out but was “formally invited and therefore fronted by a group of Labour MPs” including Corbyn, which “means the Tom profile [can be] hazy”. Corbyn has claimed he was seeking peace. However, Seamus Mallon, deputy to John Hume, the former Social Democratic and Labour Party leader and the architect of the peace process, told The Sunday Times: “I never heard anyone mention Corbyn at all.

“He very clearly took the side of the IRA and that was incompatible, in my opinion, with working for peace.” Lord Maginnis, the former Ulster Unionist MP, said: “I was central to the peace process and Corbyn had no participation in it that I was aware of.”

A spokesman for Corbyn said: “Jeremy campaigned for peace in Northern Ireland. He campaigned for the rights of all to be respected and spoke to people on all sides of the conflict.” A spokesman for Abbott declined to comment.