Defending a Liar-bility

Today The Pensive Quill carries a piece from guest writer Antaine Mac Dhomhnaill ruminating on recent events in the scandal saturated life of Gerry Adams.

I open the paper less often than once was the case. I do not recognise the new narrative and have not done so for quite some time; more importantly, I do not want to understand it or allow it form in my subconscious.

Following a documentary which alleged Gerry Adams had ordered the disappearing of people by the IRA and his response once again denying the army and condemning Brendan Hughes as a liar, my senses were heightened by what has been an unusual public reaction to a very typical choreography designed to protect all things Adams and thus an interest in this horrible depressing mess was rekindled.

I had grown weary of the reaction to Liam Adams conviction for Child Rape and evidence that the Provisional Leadership had engaged in a systematic concealment of sex abuse. The typical evil perpetrated in pseudonym, guise of care or concern and pretence of detachment was laid on again.

This process is to abuse the abused and demonize those who had helped the abused find their voice. It made traitors of victims and their supporters for years. It is a mechanical function determining everyone else is to blame for an Adams Scandal. All journalists become West Brits and agents: a journalist’s duty to publicize these things always forgotten in feigned indignation. It has no meaning, it has just a standard impact on people’s minds and no-one cared enough to question it. They have questioned it recently.

Always in the backdrop of crisis have been the other typical components of cynicism in this society designed to excuse the evil directing it. The Nationalist working class are so used to it now that it has become laboursome to discuss and lethargic to read.

The pipe bombs and hoax bombs of counter agency abound to distract and like clockwork the alleged death threats from crazed Dissidents are laid against Sinn Féin community workers. Community workers who have been funded to resolve such threats for others yet now publicize only a vague threat made against them from a defunct organization. This week has been different, refreshingly so and perhaps the first crisis in which attempts to heighten tension and garner emotive loyalty through counter agency has not worked in the way that it used to.

Amidst all the cynicism and commentary came an unpleasant distraction from the Sinn Féin leadership crisis but as always connected. A family ran commemoration to mark the life and unveil a mural to the late Martin Meehan came under attack. Martin Meehan was not the victim of the poisoned pens of Sinn Féin; his children were. I ask could anyone be a parent’s friend while simultaneously attacking their children?

I realised that for years upon years the generic rebuttal for criticizing the Adams leadership was to “provide an alternative”. It was not so much in the Sinn Féin refusal to participate in a commemoration not in their control, but more so, their strenuous efforts to prevent it from going ahead that I witnessed a striking truth. Those accepting the Sinn Féin challenge and attempting to provide any alternative will be subjected to abuse, they will have their integrity decimated and their lives ruined by campaigns of slander. This is the Adams leadership I know. Control, emotional manipulation, slander, threat, and innuendo.

As Adams prepared to travel to America in the wake of this scandal, those in his party with establishment ambition must have breathed a sigh of relief. For months the priority to defend the leader has superseded the role of the party and its politics.

There are very, very few not of the establishment on Sinn Féin’s books anymore which makes their attempts to appease the grassroots so unappealing and yet how they try.

Jim Gibney was chosen to appeal to the consciousness of the grass roots via the Irish News. His failure, the absolute and humiliating failure, to stir any emotion other than complete contempt and pure disgust was present first.

I followed weaving words of slavery as they limped through nonsense defining nothing. To dissect a defence of Adams is to first conjure the images of dying Hunger Strikers. Where once they died for their friends and stood as smiling, strong, undauntable Volunteers, now,and because of the likes of Gibney, they suffer in my mind; desperate, young, and dying, all to have Owen Carron elected. They are dying for a leech and for no-one else, and we cannot help them, see, nor stop their suffering. They have been sold for a sociopath and his personal quests for prestige. This sociopath can still rely upon slimy little publicists who will laud him a hero and do so full in the knowledge of all the evil he represents.

Dissecting a defence of Adams is to follow his frantic efforts to protect a Child Rapist via a systematic covering up of child abuse and sexual crime. It is to feel the fear of being silenced by the Provisional IRA and blackened, ostracised, and forever tainted. It is to hear again the echo of his first condemnations of Republicans of conscience like the Dark. It is to watch his lips construct the term “liar” and all to excuse himself, not just from complicity in the disappearance of people but a service in the Irish Republican Army that men like the Dark were so proud of.

In constructing his defence of Adams, Jim Gibney choose the memory of Óglach Thomas Begley in a nefarious agenda so blatant and so lazy that the cringing inflicted was as painful as it was to read the rehashed laboured sycophantic babble of no defence that used to blind so many of us.

Jim Gibney and Gerry Adams had the honour of carrying an IRA Martyrs coffin in 1993. They have been permitted to ram that honour down our throats for 20 years. Carrying the coffin of Bootsy Begley was an honour bestowed upon them that they should be very proud of.

Jim Gibney's assertion is that doing so was a sacrifice. It was a tough decision which bestowed honour on the dead and on others. It was a risk that Adams took displaying Adams's courage and commitment to the cause. That suggestion quite frankly is an insult to the memory of the dead and the people who gathered that day to bury a martyr. What risk for Ireland was taken by those healthy enough to carry a coffin when inside laid he who had risked all and lost? Imagine someone contemplating how the enemy may view you for honouring those you sent to fight. This is the twisted sickness of the kitchen cabinet’s psyche demanding kudos for collaborationist thought.

Attempting to manipulate emotions long numbed they ask us to see Gerry Adams before the Hunger Striker scandal, the Child abuse Scandal and the scandal of the Disappeared. There is somewhere a tragedy in Jim’s failure to achieve this; all he managed to create was absolute disgust, disgust at using the dead to sanctify a dirty name.

In the article, Gibney childlike in adulation, recounts an anecdote of Adams meeting the establishment in "Government Buildings", Reynolds and Hume present and a trilateral handshake which beamed around the globe. Triumphantly Gibney states that underneath his shirt and known to but a few, Adams wore a Bobby Sands t-shirt. A sickly feeling consumed my being and I felt a guilt for having indulged this creature’s badness.

I do not believe for a second Gerry Adams did any such thing. Were I to entertain Gibney’s fanatical sycophancy I would ask why Adams concealed the image of Sands under an expensive shirt that day? Was it shame? Was it a realization that the image of our martyred dead could never be exhibited in the chambers they had embraced in place of National liberation?

Sands was a greater man than all three present and here we are being asked by a lesser man again to view Gerry Adams a 65 year old embroiled in scandal after scandal and all of them based on evil as a youthful mischievous rebel and asked to do so for his denigrating the image of Bobby Sands martyr to that of a sweaty old vest while he sucked the fingers of tramps like Hume and Reynolds.

They need us to believe that carrying a coffin can be an equal deed to that which led the martyr to it or hiding a t-shirt under a shirt can equal true patriotism; they need us to see an embarrassment and a failure as an icon of virtue.

The week concluded with Declan Kearney’s attempt to defend Adams in an interview conducted by Mark Carruthers and featuring Mike Nesbit of the UUP. How eloquently Kearney can represent the establishment. The interview seemed placid until asked if he believed his leaders denials regarding IRA membership. When he replied “absolutely”, Carrurthers and Nesbitt sniggered and laughed. Kearney’s dignity extricated his body and slid under his chair. Another ambitious business-like politician humiliated in attempting to defend a liability.

Mike Nesbit informed Declan Kearney that Unionism's leadership, the British Prime Minister, had apologised to the Irish people for Bloody Sunday, and for collusion in the case of Pat Finucane and Kearney could not provide an answer as to why the leader of the Provisionals could not commit the same to the family of Jean McConville or others. This was a Unionist telling a Nationalist that his leader did not possess the integrity of a British Tory Prime Minister and that Nationalist being left without an answer. That is an insult to every Irish man and woman at home, abroad, living or dead. Republican or other wise.

Adams is irreparably damaged. The working class of the 6 counties no longer accept the fostered hype from counter insurgency tactics but alienation and apathy is so high it will not remove him.

Republicans are outraged at the slandering campaigns being waged against opposition to Sinn Féin, and are truly appalled by the arrogance and sheer detachment that witnessed wealthy aging men condemn the sacred dead as liars: but Republicans are denied a voice by the establishment and it will soon be hushed. The removal of Adams is unlikely but it may be just held in the ambition of those like Declan Kearney and Mary Lou McDonald who have been wincing at the name Gerry Adams for months.

The tragedy there would be the removal of one Anti-Republican leadership to impose another in the name of a cause these people are barred from.