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In 2015 he published a book Terrorists At The Table in which he mentioned the episode where he helped Adams write a speech in response to Tony Blair’s speech in which he demanded an end to the IRA. According to Powell:
We were nervous about the response but Adams called me a few days later and said, to my relief, it was a good speech. To my surprise he asked me if I would draft his response. I tried to write in Republican-speak and composed a passage that ended with “So if you ask me do I envisage a future without an IRA? The answer is obvious. The answer is yes.” I turned on the television a few days later to see Adams deliver the speech unchanged. We had made the crucial breakthrough by squeezing the ambiguity out of the process.[2]
The Sinn Féin machine went into overdrive with all the panache we would now associate with Donald Trump, lies, lies and how dare you? However, recently declassified documents have revealed that in fact, surprise, surprise Sinn Féin were lying and Adams did indeed get some help with his speech.
It was almost certainly not the first time this occurred, though on other occasions Adams would not have been aware of it. His close confidant, Denis Donaldson, was a British agent. He whispered in Adams’ ear over the years and at key points during the peace process and almost certainly helped him draft the odd statement, policy document etc. Donaldson would probably on more than one occasion have said to his handlers, “Gerry is a bit stuck on this point, do you have any suggestions?” And British intelligence would have helped Donaldson come up with some ideas. It is how spies, informants and infiltrators work. If Donaldson never did that, then he was the first spy to be so close to a leader and limit himself to making tea, whilst the Great Helmsman did all the thinking. There is however one speech from Adams that no one else has ever claimed responsibility for.
In 1983, the then recently elected MP for West Belfast was chosen or decided to be the main speaker at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown. It was, as the SF newspaper An Phoblacht said, a glorious sunny day. Thousands had gathered for the event. It did indeed have a festive air about it all. I was there. I remember it well. The procession was led, not by Adams or anyone else, but by a 25 strong military uniformed IRA Colour Party. They made an impressive addition to the event. But it was Adams’ speech and not the Colour Party that made the news. He addressed the Colour Party, all IRA members, obviously - the thousands gathered, some of whom I would later learn were in the IRA, but most of whom were not - with the words Fellow Gunmen and Gunwomen.
It was a remarkable statement from a man who had made a career of denying he had ever been in the IRA and would continue to do, even now. It may well have been a spur of the moment ad lib comment, as An Phoblacht did not include it in the transcript of the speech published a few days later, preferring to claim that Adams had “ironically addressed the assembly.”[3] What was most ironic was that Adams had applied to be a gunman of sorts. As a newly elected MP he had applied to the RUC for permit to carry a handgun like his predecessor, the much unlamented Gerry Fitt had.[4]
Nevertheless, it caused quite a stir. Whilst the Irish Times preferred to concentrate on Adams' call for new tactics to expand their base in the South,[5] other papers went berserk. The Evening Herald put Adams on the front page saying that he might be prosecuted for incitement to violence.[6] Discussions on violence were very fraught at the time. Even the independent senator Brendan Ryan got into trouble for describing the Free State (southern) army as hired killers. He had made statements about legalised gunmen and gunwomen, which were certainly not written by any British spook.
I believe our troops should turn the other cheek. That is the response of Christians… What we do, with respect, is train them to kill. We spend a lot of our resources, about £200 million a year, to train them to kill … We make sanctimonious speeches about violence being wrong when people use it but not when the Army uses it. There is a moral somewhere behind this.[7]
Hypocrisy abounds on the issue of violence and to prove the point calls were made for Adams to be prosecuted over his fellow gunmen remark. They came to nothing. Should anyone ever decide to publish the collected speeches of Gerry Adams, they will probably be able to include his 1983 Fellow Gunmen speech. As for the other speeches, we have no idea how often British intelligence operatives like Denis Donaldson had a hand or part or even a major contribution to the rest of his speeches, though obviously Jonathan Powell would have to be credited for at least one of them. A publishers’ nightmare. Just who and how would you ask for permission and who would have ultimate copyright over them? How would you credit them? Gerry & Co., Gerry and the Duplicitous Dozen, or just perhaps, Gerry and the Occasional Spook. And the title would be: Ne’er a Gunman.
References
[1] Belfast Telegraph (28/07/2025) Exclusive: Files prove key parts of seminal Adams’ speech written by man now key figure in British intelligence. Sam McBride.
[2] Powell, J. (2015) Terrorists at the Table: Why Negotiating is the Only Way to Peace. St Martin’s Publishing Group. New York. para 14.40
[3] For a transcript of the speech and Sinn Féin coverage see An Phoblacht (23/06/1983) pages 8 & 9.
[4] Irish Press (20/06/1983) Adams asks RUC for gun permit. p.1
[5] Irish Times (29/06/1983) Adams urges new tactics for SF in South. pp 1 & 6.
[6] Evening Herald (20/06/1983) Adams faces Garda action. p.1
[7] Irish Press (24/06/1983) Ryan defends ‘paid killers’ Army speech. p.7
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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