Americans had no idea about Adams’s past.
IT HAS been a bad week for Sinn Féin, a really bad week on both sides of the Atlantic. And it all began with a really awful Wednesday. Last Wednesday, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams attended a PSNI station for questioning about his alleged involvement in the abduction and disappearance of Jean McConville. If he was hoping for a speedy, non-hostile session with the detectives investigating the murder 42 years ago followed by a triumphant declaration of his innocence on the steps of Antrim police station, he was to be badly disappointed.
It was a calculated gamble but one that he seemed well-placed to win.
The interviews from Boston College tapes, the Sunday Telegraph and CBS News from Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price and, allegedly, from Ivor Bell, were all hearsay, basically worthless without supportive evidence. Given that forensics or ballistics evidence is non-existent, the only thing Adams had to fear was losing control of his own mouth. Provided he did not slip up and give his interrogators an opening, he could walk out of PSNI custody a free man, in all senses of the phrase.
But if that was the plan, it quickly went pear-shaped. The major unintended, unforeseen consequence was that his arrest ignited a worldwide media firestorm; initially perplexed at this turn of events, the world’s press became increasingly appalled and hostile towards the Sinn Féin leader as the harrowing details of Jean McConville abduction and death, and especially the ordeal faced by her abandoned children, seeped into the media consciousness.
As the media distaste grew, so did the hordes of journalists outside Antrim police station. By the end of the week, as the PSNI sought to extend his detention, one cartoon- ist depicted Adams as a werewolf toting a revolver behind his back.
In New York’s State Supreme Court in Manhattan, at around the same time as Adams walked into Antrim PSNI station, one of Sinn Féin’s richest and most influential fund-raisers in the US learned that his construction company had been slapped with a $55m fine for fraud. The New York Times says it is one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a building firm in America.
Structure Tone, one of America’s largest construction firms, had bilked banks, law firms and ad agencies out of tens of millions of dollars over four years by persuading its subcontractors to falsely inflate customers’ bills. Clients swindled included Bank of America and Wall Street giants Moody’s and Bloomberg.
Structure Tone was co-founded in 1971 by Pat Donaghy, a native of Co. Tyrone, who emigrated to the US in the 1950s. It has grown into a thriving concern that generates some $3bn a year in revenues. Many employees are former republican activists from Tyrone, a county whose expats also dominate the secretive republican group in America, Clann na nGael.
Donaghy is one of Sinn Féin’s major financial backers and raises money for the party’s American wing, Friends Of Sinn Féin, by selling tables at fundraising dinners to contractors and sub-contractors who do business with Structure Tone. Donaghy was, according to a report in the Sunday Independent, a major organiser of first fundraising dinner in Manhattan with Gerry Adams present after a US
ban on the Sinn