GERRY THE LIAR
Ruth Dudley Edwards listens with
amazement to the obfuscations of the Sinn Fein leader
GERRY ADAMS is a liar of genius. He Lies to governments, to journalists and to his own followers, and he gets away with it. His autobiography omitted any mention of his career in the IRA, a feat compared by the writer Anthony McIntyre to George Best telling his story without mentioning that he played for Manchester United.
Last Saturday, on BBC Ulster, in an interview with Mark Simpson, he gave a masterclass in mendacity. The subject was the IRA's apology for having killed nine people and injured 130 on 21 July 1972: 'While it was not our intention to injure or kill non-combatants, the reality is that on this and on a number of other occasions, that was the consequence of our actions.' That, of course, was a big lie in itself, since the IRA enthusiastically murdered civilians until it realised that Irish-American donors and domestic voters disapproved.
Why had the IRA issued this apology, asked Simpson, who knows it was primarily to make it harder for Tony Blair to yield to David Trimble's demand that Sinn Fein be penalised if the IRA goes on rearming, targeting, murdering, mutilating and racketeering. (Adams and company long ago learnt how to make a virtue out of the organisation's very savagery: when the brute does anything halfway human, onlookers emit little shrieks of gratitude and tell unionists to give it posies.) 'My understanding,' lied Adams (who after a quarter of a century on the Army Council still claims to be but a messenger), 'is that it's entirely around the 30th anniversary of Bloody Friday, which is coincidental to everything else that is happening': it was a 'genuine' apology. Well, one could hardly expect Adams to confide that the apology was also designed to distract attention from allegations about his own role on that dreadful day.
Asked how he felt about the IRA's record, Adams intoned the mantra designed to give a terrorist who bombs a restaurant moral equivalence with a soldier who shoots a sniper: 'There can be no hierarchy of either victimhood or hierarchy of perpetrators.' He went further. 'One of the great unresolved, unheeded hurts within the broad nationalist constituency is that there isn't even an acknowledgment that some people there have been killed. It doesn't even come on the Richter scale of consciousness of the state or the establishment.' Wow! £200 million going on the Savile inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Taxpayers funding yet another investigation into the allegation of state collusion with the loyalists who murdered the solicitor Pat Finucane, a senior member of the IRA. What exactly does the heartless British government have to do to show it cares?
'It's alleged,' said Simpson, 'that at that time you were a senior member of the IRA in Belfast. Were you?' Now, as they say in Belfast, the dogs in the street know that at the time Adams was adjutant of the Belfast Brigade and one of the planners of Bloody Friday. So what did Adams say? He said, 'No.' He had been a Sinn Fein activist, he explained, but not a member of the IRA. Simpson: 'Have you ever been a member of the IRA?' No,' said Adams, who is just celebrating 37 years in that organisation. And, slipping into unctuous mode, he added, 'And I have to say that it's a bit rich having to all the time answer this question on a continuous basis.'
Now Simpson could have quoted a column Adams wrote in 1976 while interned — 'Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer' — but he probably knew that Adams would repeat the familiar lie that, since the column was written under an alias, it wasn't him that week. 'Many people listening to this interview will find it inconceivable, incredible and unbelievable,' expostulated Simpson, 'that somebody like you could hold such a senior position within the republican movement and not ever have served as a member of the IRA,' Well,' said Adams blithely, 'that's a matter for them; 'So why have you never sued any of the newspapers that talked about you being a senior member of the IRA at the time of Bloody Friday?' (Or, indeed, David Sharrock and Mark Davenport for their 1997 biography.) 'Well,' explained Adams in judicious statesman mode, his legal adviser 'always advised against suing for libel because it just wasn't financially worth it'. He did not add that there are enough disaffected republicans around who so hate him for his duplicity, hypocrisy, ruthlessness, opportunism, arrogance, coldness, sanctimoniousness, vanity, pomposity and pretension that they would queue to appear against him in any libel action. (That is why Penguin's lawyers are letting them publish journalist Ed Moloney's The IRA: A Secret Histoty, which will make the autumn very difficult for Adams.) 'How do you feel when these allegations are made'?' asked Simpson.
Adams went on the offensive. 'Well, where have these allegations been made? You're the one that's making these allegations.' So taken aback was Simpson by the absurdity of this question that he fatally answered, 'The Daily Telegraph as recently as this week.' Since republicans routinely dismiss the Telegraph as a mouthpiece for anti-peace securocrats, the bully transmogrified into the amused sophisticate. 'Well, the Daily Telegraph is hardly something I'm going to take too seriously.'
Simpson laboured on gallantly. 'Last year you described the events of 11 September in the United States as "ethically indefensible". Was Bloody Friday "ethically indefensible"?'
Adams became caring again. 'It isn't my intention in this interview to pick over any incident or any action in the last 30 years.. . . It wouldn't do you or me or your listeners and particularly those people who lost loved ones on that day ... any good. What we have to do is to make sure that these incidents never happen again...
When Simpson repeated the question, Adams turned weary but avuncular. 'Well, you see, I think we'd get into, Mark, if you don't mind me saying so, into what I chided you very gently about a moment ago. Here we are trying to make sure the conflict ends. Here we are trying to make sure that the peace process — which is a very difficult process — actually works. And what you want to do is to have a discussion about an IRA operation that happened 30 years ago.' Yet, daily, Sinn Fein encourages every republican family with members killed during the Troubles by the security forces or by loyalists — who are deemed too stupid to kill people without help from the state — to sue and/or demand a public inquiry.
After this breathtaking sequence of lies and evasion, Adams was asked if he favoured a truth and reconciliation commission. He was positive, assuming the British army and the police participated. 'I think that, as part of the healing process, we need to be looking at ways of getting to the truth of what occurred.' Yep, that's the word he used. 'Truth'.
'Under the present leadership republicanism has become a corporate lie,' wrote Anthony McIntyre recently. In Gerry Adams, it certainly has a worthy chief executive.
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