Why it’s still not too late for New York Mayor de Blasio to apologise for his ‘Gerry Adams Day’ stunt
Another St Patrick’s Day has come and gone. Celebrated by Irish people worldwide and by many who have no connection to Ireland but are happy to be Irish for a day. Capital cities across the world vie for the best place to celebrate by drowning their shamrock but, for many, the place to be is New York, where all are welcomed with open arms and cead mile failte by its Mayor, Bill de Blasio.
I don’t know Mayor de Blasio, but on checking the internet, one of the many quotes attributed to him is the fact that his parents were divorced when he was seven and that he was brought up by his mother’s side of the family.
I would have thought, therefore, that Mayor de Blasio would have understood what it was like to be forced to grow up not having his dad involved in his life during his formative years; that he would be able to appreciate and empathise with the many young children left without a father, or mother, cruelly taken from them, not by the unfortunate act of divorce, but the calculated, premeditated act of men with an insatiable appetite for evil.
Sadly, there are many young children in Ireland who had to be brought up by family members and grandparents, not because of a family divorce, but because terrorists killed their parents.
My brother, John, an off-duty police officer, was killed by the IRA 30 years ago, while serving ice-cream in my family-run parlour to young children. They also shot and injured two of those innocent teenage customers, whose only ‘crime’ was lovLaudable
ing our ice-cream. I buried my dad on the same date one year after he identified my brother’s dead body in hospital. I buried my mum a few years later. Both died from broken hearts.
To hear Mayor de Blasio eulogise the former Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and “rename” St Patrick’s Day after him brought shame on the proud city of New York and its people,
who suffered one of the world’s most horrendous acts of terror on that infamous day 9/11.
In his St Patrick’s Day speech, Mayor de Blasio said: “History will remember Gerry Adams
for being one of the people who did something truly heroic and revolutionary, who found a path to peace where others could not envision it. And so many are alive today because of that.”
sentiments. But, sadly, many fathers and mothers and children are dead today because of Gerry Adams’s “heroic and revolutionary” support for men of violence.
Mayor de Blasio’s unsympathetic and, in my opinion, misguided gesture of honouring an apologist for terror has caused great offence and gratuitous hurt to thousands of grieving families across the island of Ireland.
All murders are wrong — no matter which organisation carried them out. Murderers, or their supporters and apologists, should not be honoured.
Some people would prefer to rewrite history to suit their own agendas.
And it would appear that Mayor de Blasio is willing to participate in this sanitising of the past with his honouring of Gerry Adams.
Perhaps Mr Adams, in narcissistically accepting this recent honour, would prefer that we all viewed his rewritten, selective-memory version of life through his nostalgic ‘freedom fighter’ spectacles.
But, as the late, great, satirical comedian George Carlin — himself a native New Yorker — once scathingly asked: “If crime-fighters fight crime and fire-fighters fight fires, what do freedom-fighters fight?”
There is no time limit on grief, and I call on Mayor de Blasio,even at this late stage, to have the honour and decency to publicly apologise for the unnecessary pain and hurt he has caused to so many victims and their families, who as children, had to grow up without both parents in their lives because of the men of violence and their supporters and apologists.
I hope Gerry Adams reflects on that harsh reality each time he looks at the nicely framed St Patrick’s Day proclamation hanging proudly on his wall of shame.