HE’S BEEN SUCKING UP TO IRA MONSTERS FOR DECADES
TOWARDS the end of his interview with Gerry Adams yesterday, Andrew Marr asked him what difference the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister would make, adding that the Labour leader has ‘always supported a united Ireland and he’s been a big backer of yours over years’.
Of course Adams thought it would be terrific, for he considers his old pal an outstanding politician. Jeremy had indeed ‘kept faith’, as had Ken Livingstone and ‘others’.
(He didn’t namecheck shadow chancellor John McDonnell or shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, although he could have done, given that throughout the years when the IRA murdered, assaulted, tortured, intimidated and robbed, they have always been unswerving in their support.)
‘They were the people who were open to conversation about how to deal with conflict and how to get conflict resolution processes,’ claimed Adams.
But this is a man who lies all the time. He even has the effrontery to deny he was ever in the IRA – in which he’s been a senior figure since in 1972 he represented it at a meeting with a British Secretary of State.
These days, he’s one of its rump – a select group of elderly ex-Provos who still control the republican movement.
After 34 years Adams is stepping down as president of Sinn Fein (the IRA’s political wing) this weekend, but from behind the scenes, he’ll still be the boss.
SAYING that Corbyn and co were advising on conflict resolution is just another of Adams’s lies. In reality they were cheerleaders for the murderers of more than 900 members of the security forces, of 23 prison officers and of 642 civilians.
The Irish politicians with whom Corbyn and his fellow travellers consorted were virtually exclusively pro-violence republicans.
Seamus Mallon, a well-respected member of the anti-violence nationalist SDLP party, who in 1998 became deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, said last year of Corbyn: ‘He very clearly took the side of the IRA and that was incompatible, in my opinion, with working for peace.’
When Corbyn became an MP in 1983, he was already important in those political circles that found the ‘whiff of the cordite’ a turn-on.
He was active in IRA-supporting organisations such as the Troops Out movement, that wanted unconditional withdrawal, and the Trotskyist magazine London Labour Briefing. When in December 1983 six people were killed by a bomb near Harrods, Corbyn flew to Northern Ireland to meet senior Provo Danny Morrison, who had become famous for asking a Sinn Fein conference a couple of years earlier: ‘Will anyone here object, if with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?’
In October 1984, trying to murder Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the IRA blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton, killing five and seriously injuring 31: two weeks later Corbyn hosted two convicted IRA terrorists in the House of Commons.
London Labour Briefing refused to condemn the carnage and demanded immediate and complete British withdrawal, and the disarming of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the local defence force.
‘Let our “Iron Lady” know this,’ said an editorial, ‘those who live by the sword shall die by it. If she wants violence, then violence she will certainly get.’
In 1986, Corbyn was arrested for obstruction at a Troops Out rally outside the Old Bailey (where the Brighton bomber was in the dock), ‘to show solidarity with the Irish republican prisoners put on trial by the British State’.
Both Corbyn and McDonnell were assiduous attenders at the Wolfe Tone Society, which supported political violence and honoured dead and imprisoned IRA members.
It was at a meeting of this society that, in 1987, Corbyn stood for a minute’s silence to commemorate a notorious gang of IRA terrorists who had murdered dozens of their neighbours and been shot by the SAS when ambushing a police station.
‘I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland,’ he said.
The list of treachery goes on relentlessly. It was a few weeks after the devastating Manchester bomb in 1996 that Corbyn launched Gerry Adams’s autobiography in the Commons.
EVEN the Guardian had enough, saying: ‘Mr Corbyn is a fool, and a fool whom the Labour Party would probably be better off without,’ whose ‘romantic support for Irish republicans’ showed his lack of ‘wider political and moral judgment’.
But Corbyn hasn’t just been keen on Irish terrorists. He’s an internationalist, who essentially supports anyone who hates the west.
He’s opposed more than a dozen prevention of terrorism bills, lobbied on behalf of Colombian guerrillas and the Lockerbie bombers who brought down Pan Am Flight 103, invited ‘friends’ from Hezbollah and Hamas to Parliament and as recently as 2015 expressed his unhappiness about shoot-to-kill policies in the wake of terror attacks in Paris.
It’s no wonder he has the endorsement of Gerry Adams. What could be better than a British Prime Minister who embraces his country’s enemies?