The sickening reinvention of an IRA monster
A new collection of Gerry Adams’ tweets portrays the former terror chief as a whimsical lover of teddy bears and rubber ducks . . .
This week, in the ‘humour’ section of bookshops, you may see a slim volume entitled My Little Book Of Tweets by Gerry Adams. A parody, surely! One looks for the words ‘as told to Craig Brown’, the signature of this newspaper’s satirical columnist.
Nope. These really are the ‘light-hearted’ tweets of the president of sinn Fein, who was for many years one of the most feared men in ireland.
The grey-bearded, unsmiling Adams — now an MP in the irish parliament — has been accused of many things. For example, ordering the brutal murder of a mother of ten children, whose six-year-old twins clung on to her legs, screaming, as she was dragged away to be tortured.
But possessing a whimsical sense of humour isn’t one of them. On the contrary, Adams is notorious f or his self-importance.
This ‘ wee bit of craic’ is intended to change all that.
The introduction to the book, signed by a couple of admirers calling themselves ‘Tom and Ted’, tells us that Adams is ‘not afraid to act the eejit’.
And here’s the evidence — ‘ a mix of observations and adventure, wry commentary and random twitterings’. Example: ‘Everyone else got a strawberry on their pavlova except me. Why?’
here’s another: ‘still in the Dail chamber, boringggggg. sean Crowe has joined me, cheered me up. he sez Crowes don’t tweet. Caw Caw.’
Crowe, crow — geddit? The 67-year-old Adams thinks he has the gift of the blarney, God help us.
Crowe is a fellow sinn Fein politician and the Dail is the lower house of the irish parliament, where Adams has represented Louth since 2011.
Previously, he was a member of the Northern ireland Assembly and before that the ‘abstentionist’ sinn Fein MP for West Belfast — meaning he refused to sit in the house of Commons.
he does sit in the Dail — though, judging by the torrent of his 11,000 tweets, he’s awfully distracted by Twitter. since i started writing this piece a few minutes ago, he has tapped another five into his mobile phone.
My Little Book Of Tweets contains the highlights. The gems, if you like. ‘still on the train. Chooo Chooo Choooo. Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ he’s not exactly Oscar Wilde. ‘This Twitter account took on a life of its own,’ explain Tom and Ted. ‘This little book is a sample of some of the saner tweets.’
BUT who are Tom and Ted? The introduction doesn’t make it clear. A pair of si nn Fei n sycophants, i assumed. Possibly a gay couple? ‘Yes Tom & Ted are a same sex couple. But that’s their business,’ tweeted Adams in February 2013.
But wait a second. They aren’t a human gay couple. They’re Gerry Adams’s teddy bears. And there’s an awful lot about them in My Little Book Of Tweets.
‘Tom and Ted waiting for Voice of ireland result.’ ‘Left Ted in Dublin . . . hope he is OK. Miss him 2night.’ ‘Tom is nice. Wants 2 move in. i’m OK with this.’
And, after a bath with his plastic ducks, it’s ‘Tom & Ted time’.
it’s all a bit creepy — and surreal. From 1988 to 1994, the British government banned Gerry Adams’s voice from the airwaves — to deprive him of ‘the oxygen of publicity’, explained Margaret Thatcher.
Judging by these in coherent tweets, it might have been more effective to let him waffle on. At least we now know who wrote the fawning introduction to the anthology. ‘Tom and Ted’ are Adams himself.
‘The tweets themselves have been analysed forensically,’ he writes. ‘some of Gerry Adams’s detractors in the media are obsessed with his twitterings.’
Really? A Google search reveals headlines such as ‘38 Bonkers Tweets From sinn Fein Leader Gerry Adams’ and ‘38 utterly Bizarre Tweets By Gerry Adams’.
sofa ra sic an workout, ‘analysed forensic ally’ means ‘speculating whether the old boy is off his rocker’.
Does Adams talk to his teddy bears? i wouldn’t rule it out. After all, they can’t answer back.
so, the sinn Fein veteran can snuggle up to Tom and Ted, secure in the knowledge that neither of them will ask: ‘uncle Gerry, can you tell us who ordered the killing of Jean McConville?’
That’s the name of the widowed mother of ten who was secretly butchered by the men in the balaclavas.
Last year, the New Yorker — a liberal American magazine based in a city once notorious for its IRA sympathies — published a 15,000word article investigating her disappearance in 1972.
her remains were not discovered until 2003, when they were spotted by a man walking his dog on a beach in County Louth. her ‘crime’? she was spotted comforting a soldier shot and wounded outside her home on the Falls Road.
The New Yorker reported that the order to ‘disappear’ Mrs McConville came from the head of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA — Gerry Adams.
it also claimed that Adams was present during the planning of the IRA’s first co-ordinated car bomb attack on the British mainland in 1973, which injured hundreds of people in London.
The New Yorker’s sources were Adams’s friend Brendan ‘the Dark’ hughes and Dolours Price — two vicious IRA terrorists. Both are now dead.
Adams insists that he had absolutely nothing to do with the death of Jean McConville — or anyone else. Ever.
indeed, he maintains that he was never even a member of the IRA. That’s a bit like the retired pope, Benedict XVI, claiming he was never a Catholic.
Enda Kenny, the prime minister of ireland, says that Adams was not only a member of the IRA but sat on its ruling Army Council.
Adams is allowed to rewrite history because he is seen as an architect of the peace process, and too much digging — figuratively and literally — might blow it apart.
AND so he is left to play the role of the irish Nelson Mandela. Yet few people ever bought into that fantasy — and he’ll find it even more difficult to sustain now he’s touring shopping centres flogging a book of tweets f eaturing photos of his rubber ducks.
One of t hem i s captioned: ‘My bestest pressie! The queen of all r ubber ducks, a hi gh c l ass kinda ducky.’
There’s a picture of his little white dog called snowie. ‘A mighty dog for one dog,’ he says. That’s a joke, i think. he also poses with a goat.
Another tweet, underneath a photo of Adams with an unidentified baby, reads: ‘Ally bally, ally bally bee, sitting on your daideo’s knee, lukin 4 a wee bobbin 2 buy some Coulter’s candy.’ he loves baby- talk, does Adams. And also the irish language. he lapses into it as if he were bilingual.
There’s no mention of the special courses — taxpayer- f unded, of course — that he and five other irish MPs took in order to ‘brush up’ their Gaelic. he does tell us, however, that he has bad breath. And that ‘flatulence is a curse’.
That’s too much information, as they say, from a man who — when it comes to the horrors of his past — is happy to keep us in the dark.
But we cannot forget his past at the heart of the Republican terror movement — and how much blood he has on his hands.
Even if My Little Book Of Tweets were full of one-liners worthy of the great irish comedian Dave Allen, this isn’t a book you’d want in the house.
As it is, there isn’t even a flash of wit. The President of sinn Fein, once a genuinely sinister terrorist godfather, has become a rambling egomaniac.
There was a time when, if Adams walked into a bar, drinkers recoiled in terror. And now? if they’ve read My Little Book Of Tweets, they’ll still head for the door.
Not in fear of their lives, but to avoid being trapped in a cloud of halitosis by one of ireland’s nastiest pub bores.