A pallbearer to an era of hatred and bloodshed now thankfully dead and buried
WHILE on the run from the law in 1972, a then clean-shaven Gerry Adams grew a beard as a disguise.
In the event it didn’t help much as Mr Adams, 23 at the time and suspected of being an IRA commander, was soon arrested and interned without trial.
But evidently he was rather taken with it, because by the time he entered politics some years later, convinced that Irish independence could not be won by armed struggle alone, the whiskers had become a permanent fixture – his signature, in fact, along with heavy black-framed spectacles.
It was the beginning of a personal transformation that would later become key to peace in Northern Ireland.
In 1983 Mr Adams was elected president of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, and a member of the British Parliament, and as befitting a politician, he swapped the Aran sweater of the Belfast revolutionary for a suit and tie.
Escaping his past, though, has not proved nearly as simple as altering his appearance.
Ever since The Troubles began in the late 1960s, Mr Adams has been unable to shake the allegation that he was a member of the IRA. Indeed, not just a member, but its Chief of Staff and mastermind of some of the worst violence seen in Belfast during the 1970s.
He appeared at IRA funerals in a black beret and once wrote a pseudonymous piece for the Sinn Fein newspaper, An Phoblacht, that proclaimed: ‘Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer.’ The article also defended violence as a tactic.
Once, at a 1995 rally outside Belfast City Hall, a man shouted, ‘Bring back the IRA!’ Grinning, Mr Adams replied: ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’
Despite all this, whenever the issue surfaces the wily republican swats it away. Typical was this response from 2013: ‘I’m very, very clear about my denial of IRA membership. But I don’t disassociate myself from the IRA.’
By contrast, the late Martin McGuinness, who was Mr Adams’s friend and fellow Sinn Fein veteran, freely admitted to being a former
IRA commander.
Mr Adams was arrested several times, but has never gone on trial.
In 1978 he was charged with IRA membership, having been detained the day after the IRA killed 12 Protestants in a hotel bomb attack outside Belfast. But the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland ruled there was insufficient evidence to merit a trial.
In 2014 Mr Adams was arrested and held for four days over the IRA murder of Jean McConville, a 37-year-old widow and mother-of-ten who was abducted from her Belfast home in 1972, shot and secretly buried. Her body was found on a beach in County Louth in 2003. Again he was released without charge.
If the civil case revealed today by The Mail on Sunday goes before a judge, it will be the first time the central allegation of IRA membership against Mr Adams has been tested by a court of law.
Not that it will lead to his incarceration. But those bringing the action – victims of IRA attacks – will see it as a justice of sorts. The eldest of ten children, Mr Adams came from a staunchly republican family in the
Falls Road of Belfast.
His father, Gerry Adams Sr, was an IRA man, wounded by the RUC in 1942 and sentenced to eight years in prison for attempted murder.
According to his account, Mr Adams sold firewood on the streets to buy stale cakes from a local bakery and carried them home at dawn in a pillow slip. Aged 11 he announced that he wanted to be a monk, drawing a scathing response from his father: ‘What use is it to be a Christian brother and fade into oblivion?’
By the age of 16 he was a member of Sinn Fein and destined for a life in the spotlight. He attributes his political awakening to an incident he witnessed in which an Irish tricolour was torn
I’m very, very clear about my denial of IRA membership
down by police, prompting a riot that lasted four days.
Brendan Hughes, a former IRA Belfast Brigade commander, was once Mr Adams’s best friend. ‘I loved him. I’d have taken a bullet for Gerry,’ he said, sickened by what he perceived as hypocrisy and Mr Adams’s insistence he had never even been in the IRA.
Mr Hughes died six years ago, but in a taped interview with oral history researchers from Boston College, he disputed Adams’s narrative. ‘I never carried out a major operation without the OK or the order from Gerry,’ he alleged, though all his claims have been consistently denied by Mr Adams and have never been conclusively proved.
But Mr Hughes’s claims have been supported by Dolours Price who, along with her sister Marian, bombed the Old Bailey in 1973.
Price died in 2013 but in a taped interview before her death she admitted to driving Jean McConville from Belfast to her fate across the Irish border and alleged that she took her orders from Gerry Adams.
Four years ago, when he stepped down as Sinn Fein president, Mr Adams said he did not care how history judges him.
Reflecting upon the thousands of people killed and injured in The Troubles, he said: ‘I regret the fact anyone was killed, particularly those who were killed by the IRA. Of course I do.
People will judge me the way they want to judge me, and I accept that
All victims deserve truth and justice and their families deserve that.
‘People will judge me whatever way they want to judge me, and I accept that.’