What did you do in the long war, Gerry?
C. D. C. Armstrong BEFORE THE DAWN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Gerry Adams Heinemann, £17.99, pp. 347 Do not be fooled by the title. Before the Dawn is not a trashy romantic novel but the autobiography of Gerry Adams. The vulpine grin of the President of Sinn Fein stares out from the dust-jacket; the book itself is written in his usual style, folksy yet ponderous. Make no mistake, the auto- biography of Gerry Adams (unlike the speeches of Robert Runcie) is all his own work. But what sort of work is it? It might be thought presumptuous for any man of 48 — even one of Adams' notoriety — to write his memoirs, but Before the Dawn is of even more limited scope than its subtitle might suggest. The book covers only the first 33 years of his life; the years since 1982 are crammed into a brief epilogue. And (as will be seen) Adams has written his autobiography to conceal rather than reveal the truth about his life.
Much of Before the Dawn will not sur- prise those familiar with Adams' previous work. He writes about his Belfast child- hood with saccharine sentimentality. (How one longs to read the life of a Republican activist who was the son of a drunken father and a foul-tongued mother!) His boasts about his early sexual experiences ring strange in a man once compared by the gushing Edna O'Brien to a Celtic monk. His crude Marxism and nationalism are more predictable. Adams' account of the history of Northern Ireland is not so much tendentious as mendacious. The old falsehoods are trotted out: Northern Ire- land was a 'one-party state' and 'an apartheid state'. He goes so far as to assert that the province lacked adult suffrage; in fact, the franchise both for elections to Westminster and to the devolved parlia- ment at Stormont was the same as else- where in the United Kingdom. His opinion of the Irish Republic is little better: he disparages it as 'the Twenty-six County state'.
It is in his account of the Troubles that Adams' talent for fiction becomes most apparent. (He even includes in 'this autobiography a short story about an IRA sniper — a curiously modish device. They never talk of anything but post-modernism in the shebeens of West Belfast.) Nowhere does he mention explicitly his membership of the IRA. His terrorist links are easy to trace in well-known secondary sources: he became commander of the Belfast brigade of the IRA in 1972 and (after a brief spell in prison) joined that organisation's Army Council, becoming its head in 1979. He is often credited with helping to restructure the IRA in the late Seventies. He does refer obliquely to his terrorist past in this book. He describes his role coyly as that of an 'organiser', but it is clear from his own account that he was close to once promi- nent leaders of the Provisionals such as Seamus Twomey and Sean MacStiofain. He was present with both Twomey and MacStiofain at negotiations with William Whitelaw in 1972. (These talks were rightly described by the late Brian Faulkner as `pragmatism gone mad'.) Perhaps Adams wants us to believe that he is a terrorist but not (to adapt a phrase of John Pentland Mahaffy) in any offensive sense of the term. More revealing is his admission in this book that he wrote a series of articles in Republican News between 1975 and 1977 under the twee pseudonym 'Brownie'. At least two of those articles mention his IRA links (Republican News, 8 November 1975 and S May 1976).
That Adams continues to support terror- ism is clear enough. He expresses some remorse for IRA atrocities but always attaches blame elsewhere. He even dares to suggest that the Army and the RUC deliberately failed to act on warnings given about bombs planted by the IRA on Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, which killed nine and injured 130. Is his attempt to shift blame for this outrage a sign of a guilty conscience? He claims that he at first opposed the second hunger strike under- taken by IRA prisoners early in 1981. This is hardly convincing. The hunger strikes helped to restore the fortunes of Republi- canism when they were at a low ebb. And the election of Bobby Sands, a convicted terrorist and one of the hunger strikers, as the MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone gave (in the words of Professor Henry Patter- son) 'a major impetus to the new emphasis on political development as a complement to the armed struggle'. Adams' account of Sands' funeral chills rather than moves; Sands was nothing more than a useful idiot who served Adams' purpose.
This book gives us no reason to trust Gerry Adams. His veneer of sweet reason is laid on a base of menace and terror. But Before the Dawn gives us some cause for optimism. Towards the end he quotes that vengeful Republican cry, `Tiocfaidh dr la' — 'Our day will come'. But his day has not come. His long war has weakened but not broken the Union. It is customary for a politician to publish his autobiography at the end of his career. Is it too much to hope that Before the Dawn will mark the beginning of the end for Gerry Adams?
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