Adams was always a gifted strategist... and a ruthless liar

SINN Féin marked the political passing of Gerry Adams last week by claiming credit for the success of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association’s campaign in the late 1960s. It is a lie and I know because I was there.

Sinn Féin is busy rewriting the political history of the late 1960s to serve its political purpose 50 years on.

Yes, republicans were involved but they were never as prominent or effective in NICRA as John Hume, Gerry Fitt and their colleagues who later became the SDLP.

And leading professional Catholic families such as the McCluskeys of Dungannon, the Deeneys in Lurgan, and the hundreds of thousands they inspired gave NICRA its moral authority.

Back in the late 1960s, Gerry Adams was a barman in the Duke of York, a pub where newspaper people, policemen and politicians met in what is now called the Cathedral Quarter in Belfast.

Adams subsequently described the owner Jimmy Keaveney as a ‘nice man and the perfect publican’ whose sister and mother lived above the bar.

On Friday, June 13, 1973, a friend of mine saw a sinister-looking package near the pub entrance and told Mr Keaveney, who urgently cleared the bar.

AS they waited for the bomb to explode, customers recalled that Mr Keaveney, a parsimonious man, had loaned Gerry, the young barman who left in August 1969, the money to buy a Honda 50 motorcycle. They wondered if the debt had ever been repaid…

Many of them had expected the pub to be bombed: the policemen, politicians and newspaper people knew Gerry Adams had since become a senior figure in the Provos.

And they knew that Jimmy Keaveney’s kindness and generosity to Gerry Adams would not buy his pub or his family immunity from the Provos’ bombing campaign.

I covered Northern Ireland for the Sunday World in the early years of the Troubles and everybody who knew Gerry Adams, knew he was a very senior figure in the IRA. But the supposedly secular, non-sectarian republican movement did not always claim credit for their savage sectarian excesses and inconvenient atrocities.

For instance, they declined to accept responsibility for the murder of 10 Protestant workmen at Kingsmills – or the incendiary bombing of the Le Mon restaurant that killed 12 and maimed 30.

Somehow, Adams stayed ahead of the republican movement, explaining away their worst excesses while seeking a political solution.

He took bullets in the neck, shoulder and arm when loyalists tried to assassinate him in Belfast in 1984 – wounds he later wore as campaign medals. He was always friendly as Sinn Féin president but knowing some of the terrible things he had sanctioned, and his habitual lying, made me suspicious of him.

I was told of his role in the abduction and murder of mother-of-10 Jean McConville in Belfast and his Machiavellian endorsement of alleged mass murderer and double agent Freddie Scappaticci.

Privately, politicians talked about informers at the highest level of the republican movement relaying every discussion at every meeting of the IRA Army Council. There was even a facetious pub game: put a tail on the tout.

I remember Adams visiting Government Buildings in Dublin with Martin McGuinness in 2004, a few days after the €31million Northern bank robbery in Belfast. All of the ministers and officials meeting them knew that they had sanctioned the bank heist.

The robbery came just days after Gerry Adams had persuaded Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern to ignore Provo criminality – but US envoy Mitchell Weiss and Michael McDowell held the line. Eventually, decommissioning led to Paisley and McGuinness’s role in the Executive and Adams’s election as a TD in Louth.

ADAMS has, since then, reversed what were once his most deeply held principles: now he accepts that the Republic needs unionists’ consent for a united Ireland; he is currently a keen supporter of the EU; Sinn Féin will seek to be a junior member in a future Irish government.

For more than a generation, Adams and Sinn Féin used death and destruction to promote policies in Irish public life that they have either discarded or reversed.

He was a gifted strategist and an astute politician in an organisation where the prospect of victory vindicated their ruthlessness.

‘The end justified the means’ will be Gerry Adams’s legacy, indelibly written in blood…