Why Gerry Adams’ Easter egg video leaves a bad taste
Is 40th anniversary of hunger strikes the time for chocolate jokes?
WHY is Gerry Adams taking the mickey out of the republican struggle? If I had made a video like the one he posted at the weekend, promoting Uniting Ireland Easter Eggs, I would have expected the wrath of the Sinn Fein trolls.
Did Padraig Pearse and James Connolly eat chocolate as return fire shattered the windows of the GPO? Gerry says we should remember the patriot dead, but Easter isn’t just for commemoration, it’s for eating Easter eggs.
At first sight, it looks as if Gerry has been demoted to the marketing department to advertise the Valentine’s and St Patrick’s Day merchandise for the party, though you’d have to wonder if they are really so hard up for cash, or for someone to sell that stuff.
But merchandise has always been part of the republican project — from the handcrafts made in Long Kesh to the T-shirts and medallions on sale in the Sinn Fein shop.
In the week in which Sinn Fein has demeaned itself by blocking unionist plans to erect a stone map of Northern Ireland in commemoration of the centenary, Gerry is claiming some credit for the Easter eggs being cross-community. The milk in the chocolate, he says, is from cattle that grazed on the green grassy slopes of the Boyne. I’m wondering if the chocolate itself is from Colombia.
Some republicans are not enjoying the joke. This is the 40th anniversary of the hunger strikes. Is it really the appropriate time for republicans to be promoting the cause through chocolate?
Other anniversaries marked on social media this week include the torture and murder of the two corporals, Derek Wood and David Howes, who got in the way of a republican funeral, and of Tim Parry and Jonathan Ball, who were pointlessly murdered by the IRA in Warrington.
You might be wondering if Gerry has somehow forgotten how awful the Troubles were, what a blight on this country his “patriot dead” were, and how he can reconcile the bloody fanaticism of the IRA with his jokey manner. But Gerry has been doing this for a long time.
A few years ago, I wrote a book about him and one of the striking things that emerged from a study of his life was the frequency of these incidents in which he just seemed to be enjoying himself while others were suffering.
In his memoir, he gives a description of life on board the stinking prison ship, the Maidstone. Internees organised a hunger strike in protest against the quality of the food they were being served. After two weeks, the authorities relented.
Gerry says that the food served up to them then was wonderful — honey-glazed hams and lavish desserts.
Well, even drab food might have tasted marvellous if it was the first you had eaten in a fortnight. But other prisoners who were on the ship say they have no such memory of the food being any different after the protest.
Gerry then describes going to Long Kesh and being giddy with excitement. There was a fad at the time called streaking. Public events would be disrupted by someone running naked, often chased by the police.
Gerry ran streaking round Long Kesh. One of his fellow streakers says it is not true that he was naked. He had his boots on.
In 1974, the internees and sentenced prisoners burnt down the Long Kesh camp. Gerry’s recollection is that, satisfied with their achievements, the prisoners sat in the embers and marvelled at the explosions of gas canisters, the sound of a watchtower tumbling over. Dickie Glenholmes brought him a cigar.
Plum Smith, a loyalist, gave a very different account of the aftermath of the burning. Loyalists actually took pity on the republicans for the conditions they were now in and the brutality of the soldiers towards them.
You would think that Gerry, wanting to propagandise for the cause, would have underscored British Army harshness. Not a bit of it. His account reads like a letter home from a summer holiday in the Gaeltacht.
He has another cigar story. When Joe Mcdonnell started his hunger strike to the death, he sent a cigar out of Long
Kesh to Gerry Adams. Do you believe that? I don’t.
And knowing what we know about how a cigar might have been smuggled into Long Kesh, I doubt Gerry would have put it in his mouth anyway.
The best of these stories are the ones about his dog Shane.
He says that Shane was captured by the Brits and taken on patrols. But Gerry had a special signal that Shane knew and, one day, when he saw the dog with a foot patrol, he crouched behind a wall and whistled the signal.
Shane heard the call and broke the chain — which is some doing for a dog — and ran back to Gerry.
That’s not the end of the story. The Brits got Shane again and the next time Gerry saw him was in Long Kesh, when he was interned.
He was coming out of the dining hall and saw Shane with a soldier. And what did Gerry do? He whistled and Shane went berserk and had to be taken away. Gerry never saw him again.
When I wrote my book about Gerry Adams, it was this glibness about the horror around him which was the most interesting feature of his personality.
It’s as if he is asking us not to take it all so seriously, for he is incapable of doing so himself.
Frank Mitchell tells me another story. He was the weatherman in UTV when Adams and some unionists came in with their separate teams of escorts to the news programme.
And, as the republicans were leaving, Gerry Adams took out a piece of paper, wrote something on it and, saying hello to Frank, put it in his jacket pocket.
Frank read it afterwards. It said: Ulster Says Snow. Frank has kept it.
Then, there was the time Gerry kissed Eamonn Mallie behind the BBC building. Eamonn had been trying to get Adams to admit that he had already had his first meeting with Tony Blair. This was in early 1998, I think, and Adams countered the persistent questioning with a joke.
He took Eamonn’s head in his hands and said, “Oh, Eamonn. Let me kiss you on the nose.”
There are lots of stories like this in my book about him. If they are bewildering and forcing us to wonder what strange sort of man he is, then he is probably pleased with that.