Lying For the Big Lad

While we might all wait on the latest Iris Robinson joke doing the rounds, in the case of Sinn Fein what we wait on is the next lie. They are as funny as Iris jokes, being as stupidly constructed as they are instantly beyond belief. Gerry Adams didn’t know his brother was in Andersonstown Sinn Fein until two days ago. Just as he didn’t know Niall Connolly of the Colombia 3 was a party member until somebody in Cuba told him. We might have been born at night Gerry but it wasn’t last night.

Last night, you see, was for something else, a death rather than a birth; the death of Mary Lou McDonald’s credibility. On BBC Radio Ulster when grilled by Seamus McKee, the Sinn Fein Vice President did not quite say her boss Gerry Adams had no way of knowing Liam Adams was his brother; but she almost did and most certainly would have were she instructed to.

It was embarrassing to listen to. Seamus McKee in his robust handling of the electoral flop has restored some credibility to the BBC which up until he took the bull by the horns had been verging on sheer cowardice in its handling of what is surely a very serious news matter. In any other Western European country the corresponding state broadcasting corporation would have long since been out of the traps providing the public with the information that they need to have in order to make informed decisions and choices in relation to their politicians. Until McKee stepped into the breach the BBC was not for going there. Lest we forget the North is the land of the peace process and as we know there are some things that are not afforded the protection of the peace process, a raped child being the latest to be cast into the ‘excluded from concern’ category. Whatever else, the BBC must always defend the process.

Seamus McKee is the radio interviewer par excellence. Anybody being questioned by him – as I have been – can expect no quarter. He is neither ignorant nor bullish, just methodical, forensic and unrelentingly persistent. And he brought all of it to bear on the less than illustrious Mary Lou McDonald. He never once humiliated her; she managed that all by herself.

Liam Adams, the brother Gerry Adams has long believed to be a child rapist, was this week uncovered by the Sunday Tribune as having served as a chairperson of a Sinn Fein cumann in West Belfast some time after Gerry Adams claimed to have expelled him from the party. In response to Seamus McKee’s suggestion that the party far from having expelled Liam Adams merely moved him, in the cavalier manner of the Catholic Church, about the country, McDonald angrily responded that Gerry Adams was unaware that the brother he believed to be a rapist was in Sinn Fein in West Belfast. The reason for this, McDonald claimed, was that Liam knew just how angry brother Gerry would be if he found out so decided not to promote himself. We are expected to believe that he hid himself out of view in the capacity of cumann chair; that maybe he wore a mask to meetings and had his words spoken through an actor’s voice; that meetings were held in attics and alleyways. All so the Big Lad would not find out.

We can confidently expect that in the North there will be an appeal made through the ‘I Love my Leader’ column in Thursday’s Irish News for a choir to be formed that will render verse after verse of ‘Come Let Us Adore Him’. But in the South of the country where Sinn Fein retains some semblance of radicalism and where debate is not avoided like swine flu, it has to be demoralising for activists on the ground that key members of the Southern public face of the party have allowed themselves to be compromised by the party president and the party support subsequently exposed to further haemorrhaging. Arthur Morgan up until this scandal was a plausible voice of critique of much of what is wrong in Southern society. Mary Lou McDonald too could manage to appear credible when she cut to the chase on issues like the Lisbon Treaty. Now, those hard won profiles have been deflated by the party leader who demands other senior colleagues bat at the crease for him.

But without any bat they are cruelly exposed to every hard ball hurled their way.



2 comments:

  1. I,ve just read Suzanne Breen,s story in the Tribune, all these bastards who ruined children,s lives and who sullied the aims and sapirations of so many republicans should be publicly hung from the nearest lampost and that includes those who gave those scumbags succour.let Bobby Sands saying come true let our revenge (and justice )be the laughter of our children, P.S.how do you know when G. Adams is lying. his lips move

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  2. im not sure they do retain some semblance of radicalism in the south anthony,not in the deep south anyway, in cork they are in fact an embarrassment,the careerists stayed and the real revolutionaries left.....clearly they are no longer a party concerned with securing a united irish socialist republic,but showing their appreciation and committment to the great liar,i mean leader.....fuck you gerry adams resign you scumbag!!

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