Ghosts that still haunt Gerry Adams
Unsubstantiated rumours are dangerous in the North, but questions about Gerry Adams’s past will never go away,
SO the year ends for Sinn Fein, as so many others have begun and ended, and continued wearily in between, with party spokespersons scuttling about trying to stamp out another bonfire blazing round Gerry Adams.
This time the flames were fanned by the traditional New Year release from the National Archives in Dublin of previously confidential State papers under the 30-year rule. Specifically, one startling snippet from 1987 — that Fr Denis Faul, who played a crucial role in brokering a deal to end the IRA hunger strikes, told the Department of Foreign Affairs of a rumour that the Sinn Fein President had “set up” the eight-man IRA team ambushed and killed, along with the innocent driver of a passing car, by the SAS that year in Loughgall, Co Armagh.
Adams’s purported reason, according to the rumour, was that two of the men were staunch opponents of his efforts to shift the focus of the republican campaign away from terrorism and towards politics, and had even threatened to have Adams killed.
Fr Faul told officials that he found the rumour “intriguing”, and that would be putting it mildly. The incident was the single biggest loss of life by the IRA during the entire Troubles. Even now, the Loughgall ambush couldn’t be more iconic in republican circles.
The party’s new leader, Michelle O’Neill, even risked unionist ire earlier this year by speaking at an event to commemorate the so-called “Loughgall Martyrs”, when she had only just been installed as the party’s leader at Stormont to succeed the ailing Martin McGuinness. “We are proud of our republican patriot dead and each of our fallen comrades,” she declared.
The men’s deaths were especially symbolic because they were regarded by sympathisers as summary executions, though a later review by the Historical Enquiries Team found that the actions of soldiers had been justified. For the leader of the republican movement to be accused of their betrayal, even with a glaring absence of proof, could not be more provocative.
Adams delivered the graveside oration for the dead, in which he denounced the Irish government as a “shoneen clan”, and rumours have abounded for years that the IRA team was betrayed by one of their own. Various names have been suggested, including fellow members of the unit killed on that May night.
Subsequent revelations that Sinn Fein had been compromised at senior levels by British intelligence from the early days of the conflict did little to dampen suspicions. The manipulation of informers was how the British ultimately prevailed over the IRA.
Such assets may have done the cause of peace some service. Forensic tests on weapons recovered after Loughgall showed they had been used in between 40 and 50 deaths.
Curiously, the Irish Times downplayed the story about Adams, relegating it to the bottom of an inside page, which hardly did justice to the interest which the release of the latest papers was bound to generate. This is how the familiarity of the Troubles has blunted our appreciation of their strangeness.
Here was a serious allegation against a man who, until recently, still had ambitions to be Tanaiste. Whether right or wrong, the story could scarcely be more indicative of the problems which Adams has posed to successive Irish governments trying to figure him out.
Sinn Fein was unequivocal. “These claims are utter nonsense,” went the official line, and there is definitely some cause for Adams’s supporters to feel aggrieved at the now official dissemination of such rumours.
Men have died for less, some entirely innocent of wrongdoing. The social media reaction illustrated the dangers. The rumour was gleefully accepted as true.
There must also be plenty of interesting snippets of similarly unsubstantiated gossip still buried in the State papers that haven’t been allowed to come out yet.
Republicans were not the only ones with dirty secrets in the North. The British had plenty of their own, and it will be many years, if ever, before they come out in full. Until then, rumours are surely best kept under wraps for valid security reasons.
But it all leads back to the peculiarity of Adams’s position within the republican movement. Revelations about his enemies are mainly history now. Adams may be in the last few months of his leadership of Sinn Fein — but allegations about him remain newsworthy, because, to quote the man himself under different circumstances, he “never went away, you know”. His party has been forced as a result to keep making excuses for him.
Gerry Adams has always reacted to allegations that he has blood on his hands in the same manner as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who, confronted at a feast in his honour with the ghost of the recently murdered Banquo, declares: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake thy gory locks at me.”
No one can say for certain that Gerry Adams did anything in those dark years either. Only he knows the truth. But the ghosts keep appearing all the same, shaking their gory locks. Now the Loughgall dead have joined the throng.
Adams can’t say that he isn’t used to it by now. He himself has spoken openly in the past about rumours that he was a British spy.
In 2014 he was arrested and questioned for four days at Antrim police station over the 1972 murder of Protestant mother of 10 Jean McConville. On his release without charge, Adams wrote that his accusers “claimed I was turned by the Special Branch during interrogations in Palace Barracks (near Belfast) in 1972 and that I became an MI5 agent”.
Some concluded at the time that it was a smart move by Adams to go public with these long-standing rumours, because pointing to the existence of a possible plot to smear his reputation neutralised any attempt by the British authorities to use it against him. Others were baffled as to why he would circulate rumours against himself in such a public fashion.
So far Gerry Adams has said nothing about the release of the State papers, not even to rubbish the rumour about the Loughgall ambush passed on to the Department of Foreign Affairs by Fr Denis Faul.
The denials have been left to colleagues, as so often in the past. As 2018 gets under way, they can at least take some comfort from the fact they won’t have to do so for much longer.
‘Adams has spoken openly in the past about rumours that he was a British spy. Many were baffled as to why he would circulate rumours against himself in such a public fashion...’