They know all about it now…

Féin chief raising money in America was lifted.

The ban was imposed after the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney, both in Belfast, in January 2006.

The dinner, at the Sheraton Hotel in November 2006, was attended by 750 people who each paid $500, netting an estimated $375,000 for Sinn Féin.

Embarrassing, costly and unwelcome as the fine on Structure Tone is, it pales in comparison to Gerry Adams’s ordeal in the interrogation suite, as the PSNI terms its interrogation cells, at Antrim police station.

It is now clear that handing himself into the police was not a very good idea. Even though, at the time of writing, it is not clear whether the Sinn Féin president will be charged, it is more than evident that a manoeuvre apparently designed to free himself from the ghost of Jean McConville has served only to tie him even closer to the most pathetic of the IRA’s disappeared victims.

Before he walked into Antrim police station, the allegation that Gerry Adams had ordered the abduction and killing of Jean McConville was known in Ireland and by certain sections of opinion in Britain.

Now, after a whirlwind of international media coverage over four days or so, comparable in his life only to that which greeted his first visit to New York in 1994, the entire world knows that Adams stands accused of being an Irish Pinochet, involved in directing the secret burial of IRA victims that the organisation wished to hide from view.

This has been damaging everywhere but nowhere more so than in the US, where Sinn Féin and its leader dearly value the many friends in the political, media and showbusiness worlds won by the peace process.

Americans love success and respectability, and they feted Adams, but, as he may learn, at the first whiff of scandal they flee.

At the same time, being arrested has a different meaning in America than in Ireland.

In a country renowned for respect for and fear of the forces of law and order, there is an almost automatic assumption of guilt when a person is arrested. Many Americans, including Sinn Féin’s glitziest friends, will believe because Adams was arrested he must be guilty of Jean McConville’s death.

If Adams is released from PSNI custody without being charged or the possibility of being charged, he may well recover most of the ground lost since last Wednesday and may even be able to persuade Micheál Martin to give him a seat at the Cabinet table with him after the next election.

But in America, a sickening aroma from Jean McConville’s secret grave will linger on.