No Sundays

Gerry Adams only last evening blogged, ‘I stopped buying the Sunday papers about ten years ago. A waste of a Sunday morning. Pages of half truths, opinions, bias, lies. Better buying a decent novel’. Before The Dawn perhaps. He also told the Independent some years back that he had stopped reading Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA after 25 pages because it was filled with lies. Moloney apparently stated that Adams had been in the IRA. Gerry Adams does not like lies, he would have us believe. Indeed he was scathing about his brother Liam for having lied about his abuse of his daughter Aine Tyrell.

So two days ago, when Gerry Adams purchased the very last copy of the Sunday Tribune from the Glenmac Newsagents on the Gen Road, situated next door to the grocers once owned by the late murdered Harry Holland, it must have been with a fair measure of trepidation. A benign view of his purchasing this paper being totally at odds with his claim not to have bought any Sundays for ten years might just be that he does not recollect buying the paper only the day before and may just have slipped unwittingly into the mode of believing he was carrying on with a ten year tradition. He sometimes, to use his own words, has no recollection of certain things.

A less sympathetic reading would be that he broke a ten year tradition because the paper contained revelations that were damning to him but pretended not to have broken it in order to convey the impression that he was laid back and nonchalant about the whole affair. So damning, in fact, were the paper’s contents, that it assertively and confidently labelled him a liar. While it may be something most people say about him in private conversation or in Sunday Independent opinion pieces, for a national newspaper to make the allegation as part of a major news story is serious stuff.

Highly troublesome for the Sinn Fein president is that the allegation of dishonesty is so easily made to stick. By denying that his brother Liam Adams, whom Gerry Adams believes to be a paedophile, was ever in the running to secure the nomination as party candidate for the Dail in 1997 only to be confronted with witness evidence that he was very much in the running, as well as photographic evidence that he was actively canvassing alongside the Sinn Fein boss in the same election campaign, despite Gerry Adams having supposedly thrown him out of the party as soon as he was discovered to have been in it, the Sinn Fein boss’s narrative has come unstuck.

Adding even more damage to the Adams story is Sinn Fein’s response to the Sunday Tribune charges which was nothing short of woeful. It has served to reinforce the chronic weakness that afflicts the version of the sad sordid saga put forward by Gerry Adams. He must feel he has been hit by friendly fire. A spokesperson was quoted in the Irish Times as saying that the Tribune findings did ‘not in any way punch a hole’ in Gerry Adams’s claim to have acted to halt his brother being selected as the party’s Louth candidate for the Dail; that the Sinn Fein leader could not prevent his brother joining the electoral canvassing team: ‘What was he to do: stand up and say on a loudspeaker that there are allegations of abuse against my brother?.’ Well, yes if need be. A loudspeaker in those circumstances is much more beneficial to society and its children than the muffler employed by Gerry Adams on the campaign trail.

So cynical are people about his account that when Gerry Adams made the allegation that his late father was guilty of child abuse a former republican prisoner genuinely believed that he had manufactured the story just to draw attention away from his role in handling the Aine Tyrell affair. I thought he was off the wall in suggesting it to me but since then I wish I had a euro coin for every occasion I have been asked if I think it is true about the father. I believe he is telling the truth about his father although why he is telling it is another matter. The challenge facing him in getting his message across is one outlined by the journalist Liam Clarke who said his word is hard to accept without corroboration.

Even were we to try, out of a spirit of generosity and compassion, to understand his personal predicament in all of this, allow him his lack of recollection, inconsistencies and foibles, we are still confronted with the awful fact that Gerry Adams allowed a man he firmly believed to be a child rapist to be promoted in circumstances that fell far short of alerting parents to the dangers their children might be in. Mull over it as we might, the evidence lends itself to no other conclusion. And if you do what bishops do then you should go where bishops go – the Ex Club.

14 comments:

  1. Gerry Adams has never responded positively to a child protection query or approach.

    It is interesting the way Patricia Lewsley, NIHRC, C. Ruane & etc. are being a bit shy of asking Al Hutchinson to review the PSNI's vetting record.

    ( our fake vetting system)

    Of course why bother? Al is from Canada, they don't do child protection there. It is likely he doesn't have the toolkit of precedence to get his head around the issue.

    Now if Gerry had been a bishop...

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  2. Hey Anthony do you think all this will affect the big lads ambition of becoming Mary Mc,s successor,I mean if he jacks in the s/f president for life job then the only way is up baby CUCKOO CUCKOO Marty f

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  3. excuse me again Anthony,I was just thinking(a rare event) the reason that Gerry Adams might want to hang on tn his position of S/F president,is that old rep saying i.e. be carefull of who you step upon on the way up, you will have to meet them on they way down again, and I dont think Gerry would like that Marty.f

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  4. No need to stoop to diplock court level here. Evidence as blinding as it's depressing. What's even more depressing is the security questions left hanging in the Tribune articles about the Adams brothers. But sure if they'd ended up in S Armagh in times gone by to be 'interogated' Scapatichi would have been waiting for them lol aye and Donaldson and Mc Guinness pulling strings too on their behalf.
    Like I said previously..soap opera never had this quality material. One comentator on the Tribune articles floated the idea..'The biggest ever counter subversive operation in history' I contend the GFA to be its manifestation.
    I'll be buying your book in a fortnight Mackers before the revised edition comes out lol.

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  5. As a matter of interest I wonder what Conor Murphy is thinking, not to mention his friends and backers where he's from. Be great if some seasoned REPUBLICAN veterans turned up at Stormont in the public gallery to eyeball those gobshites in the present climate.

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  6. Dear Gerry
    i know you look at this site,or at least some of your brown nose gfa enforcers do on your behalf so i would like to say to you as a member of the public FUCKING RESIGN now you horrible lying bastard

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  7. Its all a bit much to take in but to most reasonable people the type of lies that Gerry is now telling us even we find it hard to cope with , in his defence his brother Liam has never been found guilty of any crime of a sexual nature and herein is another problem, according to the real victim Aine she reported the crime to the then RUC so what has happened to that knowledge, its seems that Gerry Adams has told so many lies over this past 40years he now has no idea when he says something whether its truth or lies, my heart goes out for Aine maybe the party faithful will for once take of the blinkers and do the right thing.

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  8. I said this before but it still makes me giggle, disney are gonna do a follow up on the lion king, and this time Gerry and Martin, Connor and the gang are to star in it, yip true I tell ya ,its called the LYING BASTARDS. Marty f

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  9. apart from everything else that has been said ,Adams held secret talks with Hume ,and we know the outcome of that,now today we learn that Hume wanted to reintroduce internment,surely that in itself speaks volumes about Adams leadership. Marty f

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  10. The H-Blocks were an education and a safe and admirable environment that was created by the heroism and courage of the blanket men+ mixed wing veterans who forced the pace on segregation. The smallest and weakest and even the ocassionally obnoxious were all safe and protected there. But the education 'rangs' were designed to create plastic yes-men and unquestioning door mats, not revolutionaries or dedicated activists. That and the 1987 declaration of an unwinable war by SF were the tell tale signs for those politically aware enough to read them. Gibneys speach at Bodenstown in 1992 [the we're ready to act imaginatively speech] was the end-game.
    I'm just glad Adams+co. havent got away with the great deception and my grandkids will NOT be reading of him as some O'Connel figure. But hopefully as the rat and long term facilitator of the Unionist/British agenda and Ego tripper that he is. Very subtle and well worked.
    If there's anyone still out there then hopefully when the humiliation that deserves to come from all this is over, it will be the Irish who will bring final closure to the sorry mess.

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  11. AM, Suzanne Breen, Liam Clarke, Malachi O'Doherty (via FB he set up a fine comment thread a week ago) and all who continue to press this case forward: courage. So, keep up the struggle against Adams towards justice for Áine now: 'dá bhrí sin, lean oraibh an dúshlán Adams a thabhairt chuig ceart ar son Áine anois'.

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  12. Adh mor ortsa mackers keep up writing good stuff

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  13. I genuinely believe that Adams will refuse to stand down as party leader in the wake of this. Nor do I believe that there will be sufficient pressure from within PSF to force him to do so. This paints a vivid picture of the Sinn Fein party morality.

    Around a year ago an ex-prisoner told me about Liam having raped Aine and being shifted about by Gerry. I was a bit cynical about his story (given all the bad feeling that floats amongst ex-prisoners about the results of the conflict) yet it turned out to be accurate information. Which for me indicates that this affair was fairly well known, amongst Republicans in Belfast at least, so why this 'circling of the wagons' by the faithful?

    Where is the moral line that cannot be crossed? If being found guilty of concealing a child rapist is not enough to be publicly castigated by your party then what is?

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  14. Tomás, I think you are right. He will refuse to stand down. The party lacks all moral courage. Its silence has been disgraceful. Trust me, if he rather than Liam were the rapist the party would carry on regardless, spluttering and muttering about the need to maintain the peace process. It has abandoned everything else so why would it stop at abandoning children? If the leadership was to initiate an anti-Gay policy or promote racism the party would still say nothing.

    The media have displayed enormous failings. Irish Times, the paper of record, has been appalling.

    None of that means he will stay on forever as he clearly wishes to do. Credibility slipping by the month, an almost universal belief that he would do anything to anybody to secure and retain power, an equally pervasive conviction that he cannot be believed on anything - all things that militate against any real progress for the party while he leads it. The problem for him is that the party functionaries will sense that a different goose will be needed if golden eggs are to continue to be laid, and that the electorate might just punish the party for the sins of the leader.

    Ultimately, he would prefer the party to go down in ignominy rather than loosen his grip and let it breathe. But he might not just have it all is own way.

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