Adams eulogy John Downing on Sinn Féin apologists

MANY people have tried and the efforts will continue. But the reality is that nobody can rewrite Gerry Adams’s place in history.

Back in 2005, he told this writer during an interview in Belfast that he was not personally important and that he looked forward to the peace process being firmly bedded down so he could retire from politics. He contemplated a world of books and writing, of walks, sport and recreation. It has taken a surprisingly long time to see that one through.

And even as he departs the public stage, there are still those who see him hanging on in the background as a kind of puppeteer, part of the Belfast-based mechanism which still calls the shots in Sinn Féin. That appears unlikely. He has been very scarce at Leinster House since he announced his retirement from the leadership on November 17.

Defenders of the IRA have long argued that the 30 years of murder, mayhem and misery in the North and other parts of this island were “a dirty war”. They implicitly park the fiction that Gerry Adams was never in the IRA.

It was, after all, something of a detail since he was its prime defender and apologist. People of a certain age, with even a passing interest in the news, could recite his “I condemn all violence – including the violence of the British state” phrase. It was his mantra after the latest IRA atrocity, of which there were so many from 1969 onwards.

The apologists focus their arguments on how nobody emerged from those years of ‘Troubles’ with too much honour. A minority of extreme nationalists in the North see him as a hero. Very many people see him as a demon. A large chunk of the people accept him as part of the political furniture.

He has refocused and fashioned Sinn Féin into what it is – the party which must at all costs be in power in the Republic of Ireland. The big irony of that one is that he was one of the few visible and forceful cross-Border elements in this much-vaunted 32-county party.

The question now is how will things stand up after his departure from the party leadership? The writer Malachi O’Doherty, in ‘Gerry Adams – An Unauthorised Life’, published last November, strongly suggests that post-Adams Sinn Féin is at serious risk of splitting along North and south lines.

We shall see. For now, it is difficult to see the Northern cadre giving full rein to Mary Lou McDonald, a middleclass woman from the more affluent Dublin suburbs. Body language at Saturday’s hand-over ard fheis-cumcoronation will be of interest.

The old maxim that victors always write history has a large element of truth to it. And by that standard, Gerry Adams will emerge with, at best, a very patchy record of achievement.

Sinn Féin has been many things down the years – but victor it is not. Its members have learned, like good political organisations, to curb the rhetoric, and face compromise and adaptation.

Mr Adams’s rhetoric, and that of his apologists and cheerleaders, do not match reality.