Gerry Adams Retirement?

By AM Friday, May 24, 2013

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Mick Hall from Organized Rage with a piece arguing that If they linger to long, there's a tipping point for all party leaders when they become a hinderance not a help.

There is little doubt Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin is in many ways a remarkable if controversial man.

The fact he has led his party for over 30 years in the most turbulent of times speaks volumes about his tenacity and commitment to his cause. Few would doubt he's been the driving force which has turned SF from a tiny marginalised political party, which was little more than the talking head of the PIRA, into a major player both north and south of the Irish border. In the north SF is firmly embedded as the lead nationalist party, having long surpassed the once dominant SDLP. In the south it's on an upward trajectory and if it can overcome a number of obstacles, some of them internal, it could become the lead party on the Irish soft left, replacing the Irish Labour Party.

Gerry Adams, at a book signing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 In both jurisdictions Sinn Féin has a cadre of able politicians who given the chance have the ability to take the party forward and into a new era. They overwhelmingly come from working class backgrounds, which makes them unique in this neo-liberal age. Their incorruptibility and commitment cannot be equalled within the UK or Ireland. While I may not agree with their methodology, politically most, but not all, are centre left democratic socialists, and are amongst the more impressive working class political activist I have come across in my life time.

Gerry Adams can claim a great deal of credit for this. Although this is not his greatest achievement, out of defeat - and make no mistake the Provisional Republican Movement suffered a major defeat when it agreed to allow the British State to decommission its military hardware - Adams has managed to keep his movement intact, bar the odd periodic resignations which all political parties experience, and avoided the spiral of demoralisation and despair that infected Irish republicanism when previous generations of republicans suffered similar set backs. For example, in the years which followed the Irish civil war and after the failure of Operation Harvest, 'the border campaign' which took place between December 1956 and February 1962.

Indeed if anything Sinn Féin is a more vibrant and confident organisation today than at anytime in its history, bar the years 1918-23.

However, increasingly it is Gerry Adams longevity as a leading figure in Irish politics which is preventing the party from gaining ground. While he may not yet be a stumbling block in the North, he may soon become one in the South, which if SF is to make progress is the more important of the two, and it raises questions about whether it's time for him to retire from the daily grind of front of house politics. No one stays in front line politics for as long as Adams without making a shed load of enemies. The problem he has today is these enemies now stretch way beyond his more obvious foes within the mainstream media, the British and Irish state apparatus and the unionist parties in the northeast of Ireland.

Today he also has former comrades snapping at his heals who believe he betrayed the ethos of Óglaigh na hÉireann, its former volunteers, and dead. These are not the usual suspects who left the party in 1986 to form Republican Sinn Féin, when Sinn Féin's Ard Fheis voted to drop the policy of abstentionism if elected to Dáil Éireann. These are mainly men and women who finally broke with Adams in the 1990s and later. Some had served under him within the IRA, thus they know him well and more to the point his modus operandi, which they had come to despise. Almost, if not all, have accepted the days of armed struggle had reached the end of the road, certainly for the foreseeable future and they are not affiliated with any of today's micro armed republican groups.

They're mainly former republican prisoners, notably Blanketmen, who spent five grim and tortuous years on the Blanket protest, demanding they be recognised as political prisoners, which culminated in the 1981 hunger strikes in which ten of their finest comrades sacrificed their young lives.

The veil which once shielded Adams from the controversy which has raged in republican circles over the outcome of the hunger strikes has gradually been lifted with the passing of the years. Whatever his motivations were at the time, in the cold light of today Gerry Adams does not come out of it well. His friends have only made matters worse by denying facts which have emerged into the public arena, and to put it bluntly in some cases telling outright lies.

This whole brouhaha erupted after Richard O'Rawe wrote the book, 'Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike'. A prisoner in the Maze at the time of the 1981 Hunger Strike, he acted as PRO and an unofficial aide-de-camp to Brendan "Bik" McFarlane, the O/C of all IRA prisoners in the Maze. His book contradicts Adams often made claim that the hunger strikers were masters of their own destiny.

O'Rawe confirms as IRA volunteers the hunger strikers were expected to follow the orders of their commanders within and without the jail. He has also all but proven that Margaret Thatcher far from being intransigent made an offer which McFarlane, as O/C, felt was enough to call the hunger strike off. However when he sent his opinion to Gerry Adams for verification, Adams allegedly vetoed it for political reasons; and failed to pass it on to the hunger strikers, denying them the opportunity to make their own decision on whether to live or die. The implication being if the hunger strikers had been allowed to accept the offer a further six men may not have died.

Friends of Adams made matters worse when they attempted to intimidate Richard O'Rawe into silence rather than coming clean and admit that in the heat and confusion of war a dreadful mistake was made; not least because in the close confines of the Maze prison other prisoners overheard McFarlane discussing the offer in Irish with O'Rawe, and have come forward to support the latter's version of events.

Adams is no fool and he must be aware he is reaching a tipping point when he becomes a hindrance not a help to the party and movement he has given his life to. He must realise from now until he removes himself from the public arena the media will dog him with this issue and his alleged involvement in the death of Mrs Jean McConville, a mother of ten children who was abducted from her Belfast home in December 1972 by the IRA, and 'allegedly' on his orders, interrogated and shot as an informer and her body secretly buried on a secluded beach.

Most if not all former members of the IRA believe Mrs McConville became embroiled with the British security forces. Indeed, I'm told by a source who was close to those who were involved in the sorry affair, she had already been warned if she continues to associate with the British Army she would be shot. She ignored this warning and sadly suffered the consequences. No one comes out of this well, not the IRA nor the British Army. The former should have placed a cordon sanitaire around the unfortunate soul, and if able encouraged her to move to southern Ireland or England. The British army behaved monstrously, knowing full well her life could be forfeited if they encouraged her to continue her activities. It was as if they were willing the Provos to shoot her, in the hope it would discredit them. What they failed to factor in was they would not only shoot the poor woman, but secretly bury her body instead of leaving it by the road side which was the norm in those days.

Finally the Irish media and politicians continue to taunt Adams about his denial of his IRA membership. While he would be a fool to admit it given he is still politically active, many people, myself included cannot understand why he did not simply refused to answer the question when it was first asked. Once he said no, he gave his and Sinn Féin's enemies a gift which keeps on giving.

Is Adams in any position to retire?

The problem Adams faces if he calls it a day, is how to chart a way into retirement which will keep him out of the courts and leave his reputation reasonably intact. He understands better than most the former head of the Ulster Defence Association, Andy Tyrie's maxim that 'there is no voluntary redundancy in my job,' equally applies to him, only more so. In the end Tyrie was left no alternative as he was put out to grass by the rest of the UDA leadership and in truth he now lives a comfortable retirement.

However Adams is a much larger figure than Tyrie, whose longevity as head of the UDA and comfortable retirement had much to do with the fact that organisation fitted the British security services like a kid leather glove. Indeed, when you mention the words UDA and British security services, a glove puppet comes to mind.

Were Adams to retire his critics would not disappear as Tyrie's have. Indeed it might embolden them as he would have lost the protective coating of political office. Nevertheless whilst he remains President of Sinn Féin, he will increasingly come under attack, and be in the unenviable position of being unable to give his side of the story on the aforementioned issues for fear of it damaging the party he has sacrificed so much to build up.

There is a wider historical issue here. At some time Gerry Adams owes it to future generations of republicans, those he commanded and to himself, to spell out the truth about his role in the IRA, the Hunger Strikes, and the Provisional movements relationship, if it can be called that, with the British security services and explain why he took certain decisions. On the plus side, if he were to retire from 'front line politics' he would be one of the few party leaders in the world today who left office with his party in better health than when he came in. In today's world that is not to be scoffed at.

Whether he could publish a tell all memoir in his own life time is doubtful. Some have claimed Adams and McGuiness negotiated a keep out of jail card when they signed up to the Good Friday Agreement. I have no idea, but if they had, I cannot see why the PSNI would have gone to such lengths in the USA to gain access to the interview Dolours Price gave to the Boston College's Oral History Project. They appear to believe she said Gerry Adams was her IRA commander when Mrs Jean McConville was shot dead. Although I doubt this would convict Adams in a court of law, even in what passes for one in the six counties. However, it could be once the PSNI and their political masters gain access to the tapes they intend to leak their contents to their friends in the media, in the hope any revelations will tie Adams up in the civil courts almost indefinitely.

One only had to see how the PSNI pursued the Oral History Project tapes to understand why Adams believes he has no option but to deny his membership of the IRA.

In conclusion I have never believed Gerry Adams is the black hearted villain some of his former comrades believe him to be; but nor is he the faultless human being his party portrays him as. He is a man who led a movement which was engaged in a military conflict with a far more powerful enemy, which along with its allies was firmly embedded on the ground being fought over, and thus could not be defeated militarily. He concluded this before most, and instead of walking away he helped chart a way which enabled republicans to move forward politically. Admittedly he failed totally in achieving his movement's main aim.

However given the situation, what he did help achieve is not trivial and should not be dismissed lightly. For today, no unionist politician or police officer, unlike their predecessors, would dare say publicly, "No Taigs about the place." Those days are gone, hopefully for good, and whatever some may think about Gerry Adams and the organisation he led, that is a major step forward.

Worth dying for? That's debatable. But there are democratic avenues open today which never existed before the formation of the PIRA. And when Gerry Adams steps down as President of his party, which he must, that will be part of his legacy....

As to his Republican critics who condemn him for his role in the Hunger Strike, I would just say this. At the time Adams remit was much larger than the outcome of the hunger strikes alone. He was responsible for the movement as a whole and he would not be the first leader who saw the big picture as being more important than individual lives. In the post WW2 years a controversy broke out in the UK over whether the war time British government had advance warning from Ultra (intercepted German radio messaging) of the Luftwaffe's attack on Coventry. It was alleged that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken. The outcome was hundreds of people were killed and injured in the air raid on the city.

To put it crudely war is shit and generals usually make shit politicians, I think it is fair to say Gerry Adams was a shit general, but a half decent politician. Nevertheless, the greatest art in politics is knowing when it is time to go and few master it. Whether Gerry Adams will be one of the few who do, time alone will tell.