That journalism is not a crime is as much a lesson for Kelly as cops

Sinn Fein MLA’S stance has brought derision on himself

DOES Gerry Kelly have anything in common with Sir John Profumo? This question flummoxed me when raised by Master Bell, the judge hearing my application last December to have Kelly’s defamation writ against me struck out.

“Let us consider the case of the former minister of war,” said the judge, sounding pretty much like a professor conducting a tutorial.

Profumo had to resign his government post because he had been discovered to have been visiting a prostitute who also had a Russian diplomat as a client.

He might have been jeopardising national security with post-coital pillow talk, and that wouldn’t do.

But in later life, Sir John was awarded a CBE for his charitable work.

Might it not be, asked Master Bell, that, in a similar way, Gerry Kelly was once a man with no entitlement to a reputation because of his engagement in violence, but that he now is a good man, a distinguished member of the Policing Board, an MLA and someone who has earned the respect of his peers?

I paraphrase.

I was sitting at the back of the courtroom, listening to all this and thinking: “Oh, drat! [I paraphrase again.] I hadn’t thought of that.”

I doubt Kelly’s own legal team had thought of it either, but they took it up and argued that, indeed, Kelly had changed over the years.

They appeared to concede something that I doubt Kelly himself would concede: that he was indeed once a bad man who did bad things, but that he was now a reputable person, a peacemaker.

The evidence of this was that he had brought the IRA into the peace process and helped make Northern Ireland a better place for all of us.

“Hardly a qualification for sainthood,” said the judge.

Kelly might have had all sorts of reasons for bringing the IRA into the peace process, including the realisation that his past terrorism was failing. It didn’t mean that he was a better person.

In the past week, Kelly has been getting a drubbing on social media because he was to meet Chief Constable Jon Boutcher to protest against police monitoring of the phone calls of journalists. Many were sneering at this paradoxical behaviour of someone who had himself been harassing journalists with unsustainable defamation writs. Who was he to be criticising the police for imposing a much lesser jeopardy on journalists?

I agree with this point.

But I feel uncomfortable about the story of my experience with Kelly being used to undermine criticism of the PSNI for spying on journalists. That journalism is not a crime is a lesson that has to be learnt as clearly by Gerry Kelly as by the Chief Constable.

Still, Kelly has brought this derision on himself. A consequence of the superb and eloquent ruling of Master Bell that Kelly, unlike John Profumo in his later years, has no moral compass will echo down the years.

The case was referred to again in a recent article in the Irish Times about Ireland’s demotion in the ranks of countries which allow press freedom.

The paper reported that Ireland had dropped from second to eighth place in an annual global index of press freedom published by Reporters Without Borders.

Ireland is now regarded as a jurisdiction “where politicians have subjected media outlets to judicial intimidation”.

My case was outside that jurisdiction but was included in the story to illustrate how many of these cases similarly arise from within Sinn Fein.

This is some achievement for the party that proclaims a concern for human rights. It has tarnished Ireland’s reputation as a healthy democracy.

What we are seeing here is a failure by both Sinn Fein and Kelly himself to see themselves as others see them.

The feeling about Gerry Kelly when he presumes to lecture the police about the rights of journalists is that he somehow just doesn’t get how paradoxical that is; that he just doesn’t have any sense of irony, either to see it in the conduct of others or to anticipate how others might see it in him.

But Kelly isn’t alone in this. He exemplifies the blinkered vision of core republicans and their inability to comprehend how others disdain their past and their cultish, on-message discipline.

For them, of course, the ideology is self-evident truth and the IRA campaign was an inevitable, just and even noble response to oppression.

Michelle O’neill says we empathise with Palestinians here because we too suffered as they did.

Well, some among us did, but I couldn’t claim, with a straight face, talking to a mother sitting in the rubble of Gaza, that my life has more in common with hers than, say, a London taxi driver has.

I do have something in common with the Jew who gets called to account for the actions of the IDF, for I was often patronised in England by people who assumed I was an IRA supporter.

In Carál Ní Chuilín’s humility before the UK Covid-19 Inquiry we saw something extraordinary, though — a former IRA militant accepting that she had done wrong in attending the funeral of Bobby Storey, the one Gerry Adams called the crann mór, the big tree.

She had insulted us by putting the opportunity to honour Storey above sympathy for those who could not honour their dead.

But she gets that. She empathised — and the power of the impact of that was accentuated by the rarity of republicans accepting criticism.

Is Ní Chuilín’s way the future and Kelly’s the past? It seems almost too much to hope for.