Writing the People's History

By AM Saturday, March 14, 2015

Share Tweet Share Share Email

It always resonates surreally when Sinn Féin  is associated with a book launch. Because of the party’s authoritarian penchant for censorship the image that flickers to mind is one of burning books rather than launching them, which would almost certainly be the norm if Sinn Féin were ever to have untrammelled power or something approaching it. Books against the peace process would simply not be allowed. 

Approved books of course would not need to be purged of their heresies by the flames. They would not contain any.  They would have the imprimatur of the party because of their irrefutable evidence that Gerry Adams was never an IRA chief of staff or even a member of the organisation.

Those books would show how the false narrative started. His father, Gerry Senior, in fact ran the Provisional IRA but a shoddy, lazy media tutored by British Intelligence and in possession of the name "Gerry Adams", doled out at Thiepval Barracks British Army press briefings, was incapable of discerning the difference between senior and junior. It maybe didn’t even want to. The pay cheque would still arrive upon submission of copy so why bother with fact checking? Once the myth had taken legs it simply ran and ran to the point of becoming the establishment’s false history not the people’s history.
 
Adams senior had of course previous IRA form, even serving a prison sentence in the 1940s for carrying out some odious activity or other on its behalf. Think about it: a 40s man, not a new age peace activist, was destined to rise through the ranks. Seamus Twomey, Joe Cahill and Billy McKee were all ‘40s IRA men who would go on to become Provisional IRA leaders. It was encoded in the organization’s DNA that this was how it would evolve.

Adams senior was later outed by his oldest son as a paedophile. It was hard thing to do. The auld fella had been given a full republican funeral, even attended by children. This was not a cover up, just private but traumatic family business which the public should not intrude on. "And if it was your family, you would want the same respect and space and privacy on these matters." 

Adams informing the public of his father’s serious transgressions was an act of public service, not a forced tactical response to a victim of his father threatening to expose him in a bid to thwart expulsion from the movement over a breach of discipline. The father with his predilection towards illegality was just the type of character we might expect to be running an organisation that the son refused to join because he marched to the beat of a different moral drum. 

But don’t expect the truth from media elements hostile to the peace process. 

At the book launch just referred to the Sinn Féin leader decided to burn the Taoiseach and not the book. Remarks made by Enda Kenny in the United States were dismissed as "opportunistic and demeaning to his office".

President Adams said:

Mr Kenny says that I should go to the Gardaí about anything that I know regarding issues of sexual abuse. He says this in the full knowledge that I have already done this.

The Taoiseach is in full knowledge that the President of Peace has gone to the Garda with everything he knows because the President has said it to be so. On that basis the Taoiseach should also defer to the President on the matter of mischievous allegations that the President was a member of the IRA. The President has also spoken authoritatively and authentically on that matter as well. 

So shall The People’s History be written   ...  by All The President's Men.