Adams ‘targeted by New IRA’
Northern reland’s politicians and community groups have condemned attempts to derail the peace process following days of street violence and an attack on the home of Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Fein leader.
Explosive devices were thrown at the Belfast home of Adams on Friday night, local time, causing damage to a car in his driveway, just feet from where his young grandchildren had been standing moments earlier.
At the same time another device was thrown at the home of Bobby Storey, a prominent Sinn Fein leader, by suspected dissident republicans.
Storey was involved in the Maze Prison escape in 1983, where 38 IRA prisoners escaped from the maximum security prison.
Police described the devices used as being ‘‘large industrial fireworks capable of causing serious damage or injury’’.
Adams, who led Sinn Fein from 1983 until February 2018 and helped negotiate the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which led to the IRA laying down its arms, yesterday condemned the attacks and invited those behind the attacks to talk to him.
He said ‘‘I’m very, very thankful that no one was hurt. In our case two of our grandchildren were just in our driveway 10 minutes before the attack. Had a child or indeed anyone else been caught up in that blast . . . the fact is it would have injured or perhaps would have killed a child.
‘‘I’d like them or their representatives to come and meet me. I’d like them to sit down and explain to me what this is about.
‘‘I’d like those who are involved in exploiting children in Derry to do the same thing, or those who are poisoning the atmosphere in east Belfast and causing havoc to do the same thing.’’
Gerry Kelly, Sinn Fein’s policing and justice spokesman, appealed for calm and described the attacks as ‘‘the desperate acts of increasingly desperate and irrelevant groups’’.
The attacks on Storey and Adams, blamed by Sinn Fein on dissident republican groups who have long objected to the party’s support for the peace process, followed six nights of rioting in Derry which saw dozens of petrol bombs and two improvised explosive devices thrown at police officers.
The violence is thought to have been orchestrated by the same republican groups who oppose Sinn Fein’s commitment to the peace process. It comes at a sensitive time for Northern Ireland, following the collapse of power sharing between the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein at Stormont last year and the repeated failure to restore devolved government.