Corbyn would be a great PM... says Gerry Adams
GERRY Adams yesterday strongly backed Jeremy Corbyn to become the next Prime Minister.
The outgoing Sinn Fein president said the hard-Left Labour leader was ‘outstanding’, and praised him for talking to the IRA during their campaign of violence.
Mr Adams also spoke highly of Ken Livingstone, who is suspended from Labour over antiSemitic comments, for ‘keeping faith’ with the republican movement during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Mr Corbyn, then a backbench MP, infamously invited Mr Adams and two former IRA prisoners to Parliament just weeks after the 1984 Brighton bombing in which the IRA tried to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. He now says he wanted the bombings and shootings of the Troubles to stop, but has refused to single out the IRA for condemnation. Mr Corbyn also attended a meeting in 1987 which ‘ honoured’ eight recently killed members of the Provisional IRA.
Mr Livingstone, when he was leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, supported IRA hunger strikers and also met Mr Adams.
Interviewed on BBC 1’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Mr Adams said: ‘I would like to see Jeremy in that position (Prime Minister) for the benefit of people in Britain, leaving Ireland out of it.
‘I think Jeremy is an outstanding politician and I hope my endorsement of him is not used against him in the time ahead. He and Ken Livingstone and others kept faith, and they were the people who said, when others said no, “talk”.
‘They were the people who were open to conversation about how to deal with conflict and how to get conflict resolution processes.’
Mr Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell have faced scrutiny over their association with Irish republicans. Before the IRA ceasefire they controversially met Sinn Fein a number of times in Westminster in the 1990s.
Mr McDonnell was forced to apologise soon after Mr Corbyn was elected Labour leader for remarks made in 2003 in which he called for Bobby Sands, who died in the 1981 IRA hunger strike, and others to be ‘ honoured’. ‘The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA,’ Mr McDonnell said at the time. ‘Because of the bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands, we now have a peace process.’
Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, has also appeared to express support for the IRA. She said in 1984: ‘every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed.’
After 50 years in politics Mr Adams will step down as Sinn Fein president at the weekend.
During yesterday’s wide-ranging interview he said he hoped Jesus will forgive him, and repeated his claim that he was never a member of the IRA.
He said nobody could defend the killing of children or civilians during the IRA’s campaign, but it was different if it was ‘soldiers versus soldiers’. The Sinn Fein leader, who for decades defended republican violence, reflected on the ‘awfulness and horror of war’.
He said: ‘I would wish that no one had been killed or injured in the course of the conflict. We were able to come to an alternative. When you come forward with an alternative sensible people will embrace that alternative.’
He reiterated his position that Northern Ireland should enjoy special status within the EU after Brexit. Addressing the risk of a ‘ hard border’ in Ireland, Mr Adams said ‘one has to be concerned’ it could be exploited by dissident republicans and lead to a return of violence.
Mr Adams, who represents Louth in Ireland’s Dail parliament, said he told Tony Blair not to invade Iraq in 2003. ‘We said to him, look at the Irish experience, don’t go in there,’ he said.
‘The horror of war’