Gerry Adams

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J. H. Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (OUP 1991), pp.135-36: ‘Gerry Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom (1987) and A Pathway to Peace (1988) are condemned as superficial in regard to the historical and sociological facts. Adams maintains a traditional nationalist view of Ulster Protestant identity, and blames all on the British presence. He treats the Protestants as an Irish minority, whereas they see themselves as a British people.’ Further, ‘he attributes [the 19th c. growth of Unionism] to landlord manipulation, the machinations of the Presbyterian divine Henry Cooke, and the manoeuvres of British Conservatives … [overlooking] real differences in religious values, national identity, and economic interest.’ Further, Whyte notes the value of autobiographical passages in Adams, but adds, he does not face the objections which anyone who does not already hold that doctrine [republicanism] might raise against it.

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John Devitt, ‘Stories of Belfast’, Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 1994),[q.p.]: notices The Street (1992), includes “Phases”; “Does He Take Sugar”; “Exiles”, dealing with family difficulties and tensions; also “Just a Game”, politically resonant study of juvenile hurling team from Ballymurphy; “The Mountains of Mourne”; remarks that the writing is occasionally marred by pseudo-poetic prose and wishful thinking.

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Hunter Davies, interview with Gerry Adams, Independent, UK (21 Feb. 1995), [q.p.]: refers to IRA long-standing desire for peace ‘but not a bogus peace, like the so-called Peace Movements’; actively sued for peace from 1985; admits to claiming for social security benefits; his son Gearóid (b.1975); grew beard in 1971; has agreed with Brandon to do a personal book; royalties on five books so far all to charity; ceased as barman at Duke of York’s on 15 Aug. 1969, and no salary since; ‘I am doomed, as long as I am spared, to be a political animal.’

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David Sharrock, ‘The Troubles with Gerry’, Guardian Weekly (3 March 1996), p.23: Sharrock records that Adams himself said he married Collette in 1971 when they both considered themselves ‘at war’; that his first sexual fumblings were with Protestant girls on the nearby estate; and that he narrowly escaped arrest when the bus on which he was riding in disguise (the beard) was searched by paras in 1971; he has also given an account of himself in which he was politicised when the RUC raided a Sinn Féin office for an illegal tricolour at the instigation of Ian Paisley; but notes that he is the son of a man wounded in an earlier IRA campaign; an off-the-cuff remark to American journalists is cited: ‘What if a section of the IRA told me to f*** off?’

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Mairtín Crawford, ‘Sinn Fein’s Reluctant Leader’, [interview-article with Gerry Adams], Fortnight (Oct. 1996), pp.30-31, quotes: ‘I consider myself to be a writer but I am more of a political activist who writes than a writer who is involved in political activity.’ Further: ‘I was moving into national leadership and before that I had the luxury of dealing with local issues. The Bodenstown speech [1977] acknowledged that there were wider issues to be addressed’; ‘I have to stress that it has been my view for a long time that what we need is a political solution to a political problems. All the effects of the conflict - death, imprisonments, discrimination are symptoms of conflict.’ [On Bobby Sands:] ‘My main fear at that time was that the British were not going to move and that Bobby was going to die and that Bobby knew this also. He regarded the five demands almost as an opt-out clause, a safety-valve for the British to bring the thing to a dignified end. What happened was that the British elevated the thing to a battle between the prisoners and the British government. None of us could have foreseen that nine of Bobby’s comrades were going to die and of course that people were going to die on the streets.’ ‘I don’t think it [the Hunger Strike deaths] has had any lasting damaging effect. If anything it has had an inspiring and uplifting effect on many people.’ ‘What we need now is to have the two governments to play their parts. We need a proper peace process with inclusive negotiations and I would like to think sooner rather than later …’.

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Paul Bew, review of Before the Dawn, “Home Thoughts of a Republican”, in Times Literary Supplement (15 Nov. 1996), p.14: Bew notes the author’s lineage in Republican politics; quotes Adams interview in Andersontown News, 1986: ‘[the armed struggle] is a necessary form of resistance … armed struggle only becomes unnecessary when the British presence has been removed … if any time Sinn Fein decide to disown the armed struggle they won’t have me as a member’; further quotes Martin McGuinness’s declaration at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in the same year that ‘our position … will never change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.’; regards Adams’s account of the Irish peace process as highly suspect and ‘easily refuted by his reference to his own words’; shows that Adams was aware of the decommissioning proviso in an Irish News interview of 9 Jan. 1996, contradicting his later assertion that this was new; notes that he was clearly impressed by the Framework Document, but that the current version portrays ‘perfidious Albion’ as recklessly spurning the olive branch for reasons not clear; concludes that the real story concerns the take-over of IRA by new elements in late 1995 who had decided that he had deceived himself about the benefits of peace and would nevertheless serve as a figure-head in dealing with bien-pensant international opinion.

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Thomas Flanagan review of Before The Dawn, Washington Post [Book World section] (26 Jan. 1997), [q.p.]: ‘Deeply loyal to traditional republicanism, which for them was history itself, they were also, in their way, children of the ‘60s and knew the words not only to “Bold Robert Emmet” but also to the civil rights songs of the United States and South Africa’; ‘His efforts to supply a personal history of the republican movement without being clear about what he, personally, was doing has carried him into techniques which bear a striking although inadvertent resemblance to those of postmodernist literature.’ Quotes Maureen Orth, in a recent Vanity Fair article, describes her efforts to learn whether he is, or was, a member of the IRA: “Thus begins a Kabuki scenario that every chronicler of Adams is forced to participate in, knowing that the truth is somewhere within the fan that conceals him.” Flanagan continues: ‘At times in the autobiography, he emerges from workaday obscurity into a position of clear but unspecified authority, only to sink back once more into shadow, rather like Woody Allen’s Zelig. In one extraordinary instance, he is released from Long Kesh so that he can be flown, with high-ranking members of the IRA, to a London meeting with British officials, although later “I was disconcerted when my name appeared in the newspapers because I was doing nothing, as I saw it, to deserve this attention.”’ Flanagan remarks,‘We cannot even know whether, behind the fan, he is smiling at our frustrated curiosity’, and continues: ‘It is far more striking that two entire population groups are given in this book only a flickering, Zelig-like existence. You would never guess from Before the Dawn that the majority of the people in Northern Ireland are Protestants and are deeply attached to their sense of a British identity. Here they make shadowy, unreadable appearances as drinkers in a pub where Adams worked or as sashed and bowler-hatted marchers in Orange processions or as loyalist paramilitaries. They are present as cartoons - a sketch of King Billy on a gable-end, the venomous ranting of an Ian Paisley, the voice of a policeman dehumanised by a bullhorn. This is in part a consequence of the conditions of apartheid in which the two populations have lived. But it is also a willed ignorance, a refusal to enter into the imaginative life of a different community.’

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David Sharrock & Mark Devenport, Man of War, Man of Peac e?: The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams (Macmillan 1997): includes the remark, ‘Judging Gerry Adams is not an easy task because of both his lack of candour about his part and the uncertainty about what the future may hold for him.’ (Cited in Mary Kenny’s review of Man of War, Man of Peace?, Times Literary Supplement, 26 Dec. 1997, p10.)

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Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Allen Lane 2002): ‘It is the central thesis of this book - and its principal revelation - that it was that organisation’s dominating figure Gerry Adams, who launched, shaped, nurtured, and eventually guided the peace process to a successful conclusion.’ Further: ‘Thirty years after they exploded, the Troubles have ended. The republicans have accepted a political process whose foundation stone is the principle of consent, an acknowledgement that unionists cannot be forced into a united Ireland against there wishes.’ (Quoted in Lucille Redmond, review of same; in Books Ireland, Summer 2003, p.165.) Moloney treats the betrayal of the Eksund arms shipment by a senior member as the turning-point in the chistory of the IRA. See Colm Tóibín’s account of Maloney’s book: ‘a masterful and definitive version of the struggle within the IRA over the last 30 years [which] makes the figure of Gerry Adams more intriguing, not sinister and admirable [… &c.’ (The Irish Times, ‘Books of the Year’, 30 Nov. 2002.) Also, review by Charles Townsend, remarking that ‘the biggest of his [Moloney’s] revelations is that the shipment was betrayed by an informer at the very top of the IRA - an explosive charge indeed’ (Times Literary Supplement, 27 Dec. 2002). Note: Moloney's Voices from the Grave (2010) incls. the assertion by Brendan Hughes, former commandant of the Belfast IRA, that Adams was at the centre of that organisation in the 1970s. (See review by Dominic Sandbrook, in The Telegraph, 17 April 2010; online - accessed 26-01-2011.)

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Joseph O’Neill, review of A Farther Shore, in NY Times (14 Dec. 2003) ‘[…] His two most irritating traits are both in evidence in A Farther Shore. First, there’s his politician’s way with technically truthful falsehoods, as in: “I am not a violent person. I have often been accused, particularly by my opponents, of being in, or having been in, the IRA. It is a charge I have always rejected.” Second, there is his lopsided plaintiveness, which is obviously for the benefit of his political base but exasperating nevertheless. In this book, as ever, victims of IRA violence are never described in human terms, whereas victims of British or Protestant violence are accorded respectful detail; and, as ever, the IRA’s extrajudicial killings (often of civilians) are treated as incidents of a just war, whereas British extrajudicial killings of IRA volunteers excite moral and constitutional outrage (as they should; only not in Gerry Adams). Adams himself makes no bones about his partiality: “It is not my business to offer an objective account of events or to see through someone else’s eyes…. My intention is to tell my story. My truth. My reality.” / But if you tune out the rhetoric and hypocrisy, you are left with a fascinating picture of how Irish republicanism gradually moved, as Adams puts it, “from a culture of resistance to a culture of change.” […] What’s striking, in Adams’s description of the years of violence, setbacks, false dawns and minuscule advances that constituted the peace process, is how he and [John] Hume persevered.’ He concludes: ‘The Irish experience confirms, as if anybody seriously doubted it, that to settle a violent political conflict you need talks that maximize, not minimize, the involvement of those perpetrating the violence. […]’, before making final comparison with Palestine/Israel.

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Fintan O’Toole (on whether or not Adams was a member of the IRA]: ‘The evidence of [Adams’s] having been a senior IRA member is so overwhelming that it is impossible to find anyone who actually believes his denials. As early as July 1972, when Adams was just 23, the British government arranged talks with the IRA leadership in London. One of the IRA’s conditions for agreeing to take part was that Adams be released from custody to join its negotiating team. / In January 1973, the US embassy in Dublin reported to Washington that the IRA was led by “Troika”, namely Dáithí O’Connell, Joe Cahill and Gerry Adams, “who is still an active Belfast military commander”. / In 2002, Dolours Price, who was convicted of involvement in the planting of four IRA car-bombs in London in March 1973, described Adams as “my commanding officer” at the time. / In the mid-1970s, Adams, then a prisoner in Long Kesh, wrote for An Phoblacht under the pseudonym “Brownie”. In a column in May 1976, he made his only public admission of IRA membership. “Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer and, rightly or wrongly, I take a course of action as a means to bringing about a situation in which I believe the people of my country will prosper,” Adams wrote. “The course I take involves the use of physical force.” [….; Adams] has been accused by a highly respected journalist, Ed Moloney, in his book A Secret History of the IRA, of having established and controlled the cell within the IRA that kidnapped, tortured and “disappeared” Jean McConville and others.’ O’Toole then calls for ‘a proper Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. (Bran, ‘Fintan O’Toole Almost Gets It: The Irish Media and the IRA’, in Blog Irish (3 March 2004) [link].

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Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (NY: Simon & Schuster 2003), notes that Adams was granted a visa in 1994, and remarks: ‘There was no doubt that Adams had been somehow involved in AIRA activities [321] in the past and the US State Department agreed with the British government’s arguments against granting the visa. But the Irish government had decided that dealing with Adams and Sinn Fein made sense. They argued that Bill [Clinton] could play a role in creating an environment conducive to peace negotiations. / In the early 1990s Ireihad had been referred to by economists as the “Celtic Tiger” because of explosive growth and a new prosperity that was actually bringing Irish immigrants [sic] back home’ [323]. See also her record of a ‘stopover at Shannon’: ‘one of Bill and Chelsea’s favourite books was Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilisation. Chelsea asked if she could go out into the field and touch Irish soil. I watched as she picked up some sod [sic] and put it in a bottle to take home.’ [321]

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Stephen Moss, ‘Gerry Adams: “I’m happy with who I am ... it’s very important to be a subversive”’ [interview], in The Guardian (24 Jan. 2011), G2, pp.7-9: ‘[...] The problem interviewers of Adams have is deciding whether he is dangerous IRA godfather or doting Catholic grandfather. He has always denied being a member of the IRA, but few have believed him. [...] “That’s a matter for them,” he says. “I’m not complaining. I just accept it as par for the course. A lot of people will write about you without ever having spoken one word to you. You will make what you want of this interview, and that is your right, but there are people who will write absolute nonsense.” Why did Hughes make the allegations? “Brendan Hughes was a friend of mine. He would not have passed me in that road. He would have run up and thrown his arms around me and been glad to see me. But Brendan had his issues and his difficulties. He was opposed to the peace process. He was politically hostile to what we were trying to do. Brendan said what Brendan said, and Brendan’s dead, so let it go.” / Adams [...] admits he gave the organisation his full backing. “I have never distanced myself from the IRA. At the height of the war, I would have argued in defence of the right of people to use armed struggle. I would have been very critical of the IRA at times and of particular IRA actions. [...] There has to be acceptance that mistakes were made and some things were handled badly. Other things were handled very well. You just have to try to move forward. It may be a fixation by some elements about whether I was or wasn’t in the IRA, but the IRA have left the stage. That’s history. I have a record, and I stand by my record.” See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

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Quotations
Joint Statement with John Hume (Irish News, 16 April 1993, [q.p.]): ‘As leaders of our respective parties we have told each other that we see the task of reaching agreement on a peaceful and democratic accord for all on this island as our primary challenge. We both recognise that such a new agreement is only achievable and viable if it can earn and enjoy the allegiance of the different traditions on this island, by accommodating diversity and providing for national reconciliation.’ The secret document forwarded to the Irish Govt. and the British Govt. included the points that 1) the Irish people as a whole have a right to national self-determination; 2) unionist consent required for any solution; 3) call on two govts. to become ‘persuaders’ for a united Ireland. (Cited in Steve Bruce, On the Edge of the Union, 1994, ftn. 8, pp.164-65, with comment, ‘how Hume and Adams could believe that a process which amounted to the British forcing the Unionists to join a united Ireland could bring “peace within a week” is something of a mystery.’)

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For & Against: ‘We stand opposed to all forms and manifestations of imperialism and capitalism. We stand for an Ireland free, united socialist and gaelic [.]. Our movement needs constructive and thoughtful self-criticism. We also require links with those oppressed by economic and social pressures. Today’s circumstances and our objectives dictate the need for building an agitational struggle in the twenty-six counties, an economic resistance movement, linking up Republicans with other sections of the working class. It needs to be done now because to date our most glaring weakness lies in our failure to develop revolutionary politics and to build an alternative to so-called constitutional politics.’ (Bodenstown Speech, 1977; cited in Roy Foster, ‘Sinn Feign’, review of Before the Dawn, in The New Republic [US], 4 Aug. 1997, pp.27-32; p.30.)

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Armed struggle: ’There are those who tell us that the British Government will not be moved by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tell us that they will not be moved by anything else.’ (London Times, 12 Nov. 1987, [q.p.])

Good O-men : ‘Orangemen would be decent too if only the ruling classes did not separate them from their Catholic fellow-workers’ (Falls Memories, Brandon 1994, q.p.)

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Lacrymose: ‘When with the advantage of distance the history is written of Ireland in the years in which I have lived, I know that an Everest amongst the mountains of traumatic events which the Irish people have experienced will be the republication hunger strikes of 1980-81 […] The death on hunger strike of Bobby Sands had a greater international impact than any other even in Ireland in my lifetime, although for me at the time it was something which had much more to do with my feelings about comrades and friends […] I cannot yet think with any intensity of the death of Bobby Sands and the circumstance of his passing without crying.’ (Before the Dawn; cited in Shirley Kelly, ‘The Making of a Republican: Interview with Adams,’ Books Ireland, Sept. 1996, pp.213-15.)

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Ballymurphy housing estate, Belfast]: ‘[B]adly built, badly planned, and badly lacking in facilities, but it nevertheless possessed a wonderful sense of openness, there on the slopes of the mountain’. (Before the Dawn, [q.p].)

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Dead Brit: ‘He breathed in as the officer reached the lamppost, and he held his breath as his finger tightened on the trigger. First pressure. He let his breath out almost in a sigh and whispered “second pressure.” The heavy flat thud of the rifle exploded his words, sending the black-and-white cat scampering from the garden and the starlings from the dustbin.’ (in Before the Dawn; cited in Fintan O’Toole, ‘The End of the Troubles?’, review article in NY Review of Books, 19 Feb. 1998, [q.p.].)

Anniversary: ‘This is the day that James Connolly was executed in this city eighty-two years ago. It is a good day for us to recommit ourselves to our republican ideals and the struggles which lie ahead of us. In one of my first presidential addresses I quoted from Connolly’s Sinn Fein and Socialism. He wrote: “Sinn Féin. That is a good name for the new Irish movement of which we hear so much nowadays. Sinn Féin, or in English, ‘Ourselves’”.’ (’Address to the Reconvened Ard Fheis’, Sunday, 10 May 1998; cited in Peter Kuch, ‘Writing the 1916 Easter Rising’, in Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998, [q.p.])

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Hope and History (2003): ‘It is not my business to offer an objective account of events or to see through someone else’s eyes. Nor is it my responsibility to document these events. My intention is to tell my story. My truth. My reality.’ Further: ‘She was rushed tothe City Hospital. Our family gathered at her bedside, including our brother Sean who was released from prison, handcuffed to a prison officer. If I had gone, it, it might have posed a danger to those who were staying. My ma would have understood. But I am sorry I didn’t get to tell Annie Adams just how much I loved her.’ ‘While there is an inherent jingoism within elements of British public opinion, and while people in Britain are generally ignorant of what its governments have done in Ireland, I retain a confidence in the ability of the British people to do the right thing by Ireland, and Britain also, if there is an open and informed debate about the issues involved.’ (Quoted in Clodagh Corcoran [reviewing] in Books Ireland, Nov. 2003, p.276.)

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Disband the IRA?: “I personally feel that while there are justifiable fears within unionism about the IRA and while people have concerns about the IRA, I think political unionism uses the IRA and the issue of IRA arms as an excuse. I think that republicans need to be prepared to remove that as an excuse. / But we who are in leadership will only be empowered to do so if there is a context in which we can make progress. I don’t see the IRA doing that of its own volition. I see the IRA only doing that as part of an ongoing process of sustainable change.” (Comments on BBC Radio Ulster, Thurs. 5 Aug.; quoted in Gerry Moriarty, ‘IRA may need to disarm and disband - Adams’, The Irish Times, Sat., 7 Aug. 2004; see full text, infra.)

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Michael Collins: ‘I think we’re talking now about Collins with the hindsight of seventy years. I don’t really, and this isn’t through any false sense of modesty, see myself as a historical figure of that stature neither do I see the situation now in terms of Sinn Féin of that time and dealing with the British and Sinn Féin now which is a party which has to deal with all the other parties and with two governments. Having said that - and I would never personalize, I know that people, you know, blame de Valera or blame Collins, I try to stay away from that. I certainly don’t think that I would have signed that type of treaty but who’s to know?’ (Adams, speaking on The South Bank Show, LWT, 27 Oct. 1996; reprod. in DVD version of Michael Collins; see Heathcliffiam website [link].)

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References
COPAC lists Falls memories (1985); The politics of Irish freedom (1986); A Pathway to Peace (1988); Cage Eleven (1990); Selected Writings (1994, 1997); Free Ireland: towards a lasting peace (1995); Before the dawn: An Autobiography (1996, 1997); An Irish journal (2001); An Irish Voice: The Quest for Peace (1997); Signposts to Independence and Socialism (1988); The Street and Other Stories (1992, 1993); An tSráid agus Scéalta Eile (1997). Also, Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis ’85: presidential address by Gerry Adams MP to the 81st Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Mansion House, Dublin, Sunday 3rd November 1985 (1985); The Politics of Revolution: The Main Speeches and Debates from the 1986 Sinn Fein Ard-Fheis including the presidential address of Gerry Adams (1986); Presidential address by Gerry Adams to the 82nd Annual Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis (1987); 89th Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (1989).

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Notes
Members rise: Adams’s membership of the IRA is asserted in Kevin Toolis, Rebel Hearts: Journey with the IRA’s Soul (London: Picador 1995); noticed in Times Literary Supplement, 5 April 1996, p.32.

Holy terror! Adams’s voice was dubbed for BBC by Alan McKee, under provision of the Anti-Terrorist Act, up to 16 Sept. 1994.

Legal suit: Oliver MacDonogh, Brandon Press publisher of sundry works by Adams, took and lost a legal suit against RTÉ for refusing to carry advertisements for Falls Memories under ‘Section 31’; appearing for the plaintiff, Declan Kiberd; for the defence, Conor Cruise O’Brien. [See ‘Kerry’s Cosmopolitan Publisher’, Oliver MacDonagh and Brandon, no by-line.]

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“Hope and history”, the title-phrase of Adam’s 2003 autobiography, is taken from Seamus Heaney’s play The Cure of Troy and has variously been used by the President Clinton in addresses on the Belfast Agreement and by the International Ireland Funds.

Dogs in the street: Gerry Adam’s dog Shane was captured by the British and used as a ‘war dog’, and cried when he witnessed his former master being manhandled in Long Kesh. A Ballymurphy mongrel called Bo described in his memoirs joined in the rioting against British soldiers, died when he picked up a nail-bomb, and was exhumed for forensic tests. (See Joe Carroll, ‘Letter from America’, in The Irish Times, [Sat.] 18 April 2008, p.12, reporting on the ACIS conference at Fort Lauderdale and here quoting from a paper by Stacia Benyl of Missouri Western State College.

De brother: Liam Adams, brother of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, was remanded on bail in the Republic of Ireland in April 2010 while his lawyers prepared a defence against extradition to Northern Ireland where he is facing 18 charges charges of sexual abuse including rape, indecent assault, and gross indecency between March 1977 and March 1983 against his daughter Aine Tyrell, who waived her right to anonymity in December 2009 when the charges were brought. Liam Adams was represented by Caroline Cummins at the Dublin hearing and Michael Peart was on the bench. (See The Guardian, report by Hnery McDonald, 21 April 2010.)

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