Brendan O’Connor
Bizarre Twitter outpourings and a sense of victimhood are not all that Adams has in common with Trump, writes Brendan O’Connor
GERRY Adams feels betrayed by the Stack family. He feels they have breached his trust. Gerry thought they had a deal. While we must be careful here not to establish a hierarchy of victimhood, it is clear that Gerry, yet again, sees himself as the real victim here. Gerry is, of course, a man who has been plagued with victims all his life.
But he is clever enough to recognise that in the whole area of identity politics and post-colonialism, the bigger the victim you are, the bigger the winner you are. So Gerry has never been shy about pointing out who the real victim is. And he has done so again with the Stacks. Their father may have been murdered, and may have lived for a horrific 18 months after being shot before he died, but Gerry has been grievously hurt here.
“The two of us sat down and put together a process that could have worked and it was based on confidentiality and trust. I actually thought I had developed a good working relationship with Austin,” Gerry whined last Friday. Austin also seems to have done over the poor IRA guy who met with him. “When we met the person involved, Austin assured him of confidentiality — even if the guards came to them.”
To listen to Gerry, it seems everyone here is a victim of the untrustworthy Austin Stack. Gerry has stopped short of calling him Lyin’ Austin or Crooked Stack. But that’s the territory we are in here. It is Trumpian. But then, is that really any surprise? Gerry Adams is, in many ways, our Donald.
Before we libel The Donald here, we should make clear that Donald has never been accused of murder, or covering up child abuse, or of heading up a terrorist organisation. If he had been, we can only imagine the conniptions of the liberals this side of the Atlantic. Trump is actually, when you think about it, a far more credible political figure than Gerry. But they do have one thing in common, and I’m not talking about bizarre Twitter outbursts.
The post-truth world was the zeitgeist concept of 2016. As Trump, during his rise, seemed to render facts irrelevant, we scoffed from this part of the world. Those crazy Yanks. How could they be buying this guy and his loose relationship with truth? But then, it fed into the disdain that liberals here feel for any Americans who are not from New York or California. Rednecks all of them, apparently. Sure they don’t even have passports most of them. Never been beyond Boise, Idaho.
And then, after the election, we bemoaned the fact that not just Trump, but the whole of America, had been caught up in post-truth. Facts were not facts any more.
But in our smugness, perhaps we should have reflected on the fact that long before Trump or America thought of it, we in Ireland were pioneering the post-truth society. We are world leaders in the area of mangling the truth, and Gerry Adams is central to it.
Take this simple fact. Gerry Adams was never a member of the IRA. That is a fact. Gerry says so. And Gerry should know. Take another fact. There is probably no one in this country, Gerry included, who believes that Gerry was never a member of the IRA. But over time, through repetition, it just became one of those things we all accepted. We all know Gerry was in the IRA, but Gerry claims for a fact that he wasn’t.
We almost laugh about Gerry’s denial of the truth of this fact. But the fact that we accept that a major political figure has, at the core of his whole project, a massive lie, is fairly serious too, in how corrosive it is to national politics in general. It is what Shakespeare would have characterised as a breach in the natural order, and once we let the cancer in, once we accept that you can be a blatant liar and yet thrive in politics in Ireland, then it makes it a little bit easier for everyone else.
Back to Trump. Look how many women feel that sexism has now been legitimised by the election of The Donald. They feel less safe in their country because they feel that sexism and sexists have been emboldened. And the big lies at the heart of Irish politics have emboldened other lies too, and contaminated everything.
We talk a lot about spin these days, about an era of politics ushered in by Tony Blair and continued by the likes of David Cameron, where politicians became little more than PR men, selling a twisted version of the truth. Again, we Irish, and Sinn Fein in general, should take more credit for inventing this long before Blair.
Look at how Gerry started the week as a villain and ended it a victim. Look at how the Stack brothers becomes the real villains here for breaking the agreement. And what was it all about? Political point-scoring, of course. Whenever anyone questions Gerry about any lies he may have told or any occasions where he is being economical with the truth, Gerry sadly puts it down to political point scoring. Because Gerry is not the corrupt one; it is anyone who dares question him who is corrupt.
And all Gerry is doing is trying to get the truth out there. That’s all he was trying to do for those Stack people. He was trying to help them get closure. And they just didn’t appreciate Gerry and his commitment to the truth.
“If we come around to how this is being handled now and there’s no truth and reconciliation process in place — how on earth are we to get such a process in place if the awful killing of this man, like all of the others, becomes a subject of political point-scoring that’s ongoing,” Gerry said on Morning Ireland last Friday.
In other words, Gerry is the one who is outraged about this awful killing (note: not murder, killing). Gerry is the one who is committed to truth and reconciliation. But when Gerry tries to do the right thing, he is thwarted at every turn by lyin’ liars and cheatin’ cheaters. In particular, he is thwarted at every turn by those pesky victims, who won’t keep their word, and who have the gall not to understand that Gerry is the real victim here.
Furthermore, no one seems to understand either that Gerry is the one trying to do the right thing by these victims: “How on earth,” he pleads, “If we break the confidential process, are we going to get to the end of the road for all of the families who have been bereaved.”
Gerry tried to do the right thing. But the Stacks and their ilk keep interfering. They just won’t let Gerry do his bit for the victims, the victims of the IRA that Gerry was never in.
Of course this article is just another example of a media that won’t give Gerry an even break. Just another affliction that makes Gerry Adams our Donald Trump.
‘Gerry is not the corrupt one; it is anyone who dares question him who is corrupt’