Bishop Knows Best

By AM Friday, April 20, 2012

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Gerry Adams and his brothers and sisters are to be applauded for making a public statement acknowledging that their father, Gerry senior, was a child abuser. This is a dark shadow hanging over many families and the courage of the Adams family in speaking out may help to bring this subject into the open where it can be dealt with. As Adams told RTE, there is a "culture of concealment" around child abuse. That being said, the release of this information should not be allowed to detract from the very serious issues raised by the case of Liam Adams, Gerry's brother, which had broken a few days earlier on UTV ... Gerry Adams' account of his dealings with his brother doesn't bear scrutiny and leaves more questions than it answers. – Liam Clarke

Sinn Fein boss Gerry Adams can hardly be faulted for calling on Taoiseach Enda Kenny to ‘instigate an inquiry into the sexual abuse of patients in the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.’ It is what most elected representatives would do and if not it is what they all should do.

Arguing that he had some understanding of the issue he reiterated earlier claims that ‘my father was a sexual abuser. So I have some sense of the anguish and the pain that these citizens are going through.’

But the sense he has is akin to that of the bishops. Unbecoming for him this was a problem that reappeared rather than disappeared. He played Russian roulette with communities in many parts of Ireland by allowing a man he believed to be a child rapist to continue functioning as a party activist. He permitted the man about whom he harboured the most serious of doubts to be trafficked from place to place. He did nothing to inform people of what exactly his party was springing into their midst. This afforded a man, felt by the Sinn Fein leader to be a serious sexual offender, both protection against scrutiny and access to those who may have been vulnerable.

There are of course those who don’t believe a word he says about his father such is their scepticism for his self-serving discourse. They feel that the late father is a smoke screen, who with no means to answer back (the way the Provos love all their critics to be), was conveniently created to fog the Sinn Fein president’s own role in the events pertaining to the cover up of the serious sexual assault on Aine Tyrell.

It would be an act of unalloyed cynicism if the story about the father was manufactured solely for the purpose of soliciting public sympathy and redirecting the focus of inquiry. While he is more than capable of it, the story as self serving fiction is not one I buy into. True, I would not have believed the allegations against the father either were it not for the fact that some of the details had been disclosed to me some years earlier by a neighbour in West Belfast. No way of knowing then one way or the other, it was something I was not inclined to repeat.

Gerry Adams senior probably was an abuser, but one whose abuse was concealed from community and mourners alike when he was given a republican funeral. While the allegations against him were hardly bogus their public disclosure was hardly genuine. Cover for a cover up.

But who are we to question the Bishop of Louth?