It was Gerry Adams who stirred me into entering a war that I could have so easily ignored from my cosy middle-class suburb.
My hero became my leader, he embodied the struggle, the strategy and the endurance that the long war demanded. His clinical ruthlessness, his unbending demeanour and his personal dignity were traits that were admired by even his most ardent enemies at a time when republicans and republicanism were under fire.
In the post ceasefire years, I got to know him, not closely but well enough to confirm the old adage that you should never meet your heroes. Unlike Martin McGuinness, I found Gerry A quite a disagreeable person. Martin always had a smile and a handshake, a most charming man. Gerry was cold and demanded veneration.
To question Gerry now is a deeply uncomfortable reckoning. There is guilt in it and a sense that I am betraying my past self. Like Michael Phillips, when I look in the mirror, the young man, who gave so much, fleetingly looks back at me and wryly informs me that I should have known better.
In castigating The Beard, it hurts and it shames because it necessitates that my past and my present collide reopening old and painful wounds. Silence, however, would extract too great a cost from my conscience and impede my journey of healing.
There is unique pathology which takes hold of men (mostly men) who have survived history and helped shape destiny. The Emperor Caligula, Stalin and Bonaparte all exhibited the personality traits associated with “God Complex”. God complex is a phenomenon that does not manifest itself as insanity but in an unnerving conviction that events and history can be shaped according to their will.
Deus Vult: God Wills It
Adams, remapped Republicanism, throughout the last period of our conflict. Every road, the armed struggle, negotiations, decommissioning and the peace process ran back through his leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein.
His function now, while no longer Presidential, remains of critical importance to the Sinn Fein project and also his careful curation of his own memory. Writing his own epitaph pre-mortem requires the redrawing of moral and historical boundaries.
Denial and reinvention are now his most trusted weapons. He was adjacent to the IRA but not intimate (allegedly) and therefore not accountable for their actions, he alone had the vision for peace, and he alone possessed the knowhow and cunning to deliver it; and Saint Gerry delivered.
Adams’ gerrymandering of history is slowly unravelling, with every legacy investigation and every time the unburied dead bear inconvenient witness, the truth emerges bit by bit. His commentary increasingly demonstrates that his god complex cannot tolerate such disruption to his well-managed eulogy.
The Andytout News affords Gerry A a weekly platform to share his insight with its few hundred readers, a column which is more akin to a papal edict than an opinion piece in a low brow tabloid. Like the Pope, Adams, who now claims to speak “ex cathedra”, writes with the cadence of infallibility and an arrogant conviction that he is immune from error and shall not be challenged or contradicted. Infallible by definition rather than by argument, for his flatterers, if Gerry says it then it must be so.
While the Church has largely moved away from the idea of Papal infallibility, Gerry surrounds himself with a group of sycophants who cater to his ego and uphold his sense of being infallible. These people are not fools (not all of them), rather opportunists who have learned that proximity to power and wealth necessitates the suspension of curiosity.
Their brownnosing is as dishonest as it is corrosive, but it offers them the comfort of a rationale that the bloodshed while regrettable was also unavoidable, and that the final settlement vindicates us all of guilt or blame. The duty of the gaggle of Adams’ flatterers is to accept the myth, applaud the amnesia and nod through the contradictions while genuflecting at the altar of the peace process.
There is a cost to this parasitic arrangement, and as always it is paid by the victims outside the room, those whose experiences and memories do not align with the infallible former MP for Belfast West. There are claims that critical examination threatens to undermine a nearly 30-year-old ceasefire, and that those who seek transparency or accountability and the truth are opponents of the never-ending peace process.
Saint Gerry does not tolerate heresy, not because heresy is wrong but because it is a reminder that believing in Gerry was always optional and dissent from his teaching may well expose him as an ordinary and fallible human.
No Big Suprise - No Shit Sherlock
In his latest Papal Bull, Adams broaches what should have personally been an awkward subject: Kenova. Unlike the Catholic Church, Adams and the Movement have yet to learn that public opinion can be quickly swivelled by humility, an unconditional admission of guilt and a meaningful apology.
Adams’ piece offers a familiar choreography, written as a bystander, someone who was not central to the creation of the Internal Security Unit and therefore not diminished by its actions. He resurrects the ghosts of Brian Nelson, the securocrats and the RUC to confirm his analysis that the “Kenova revelations come as no big surprise”.
Adams deploys his gravitas and privilege to blame the Brits and assert that, just like the Stevens Investigation, the Brits hindered the Kenova investigation team. No explanation is given as to why the IRA refused to cooperate with Kenova even though the movement now endorses the legitimacy of British policing in this part of Ireland. No clarification is given as to why Sinn Fein provided political cover for Scap for years.
Kenova is contextualised within the comfort zone of British culpability through its perfidious intelligence agencies, yet no similar analysis is provided on the machinery deployed by the IRA to maintain internal security.
Stakeknife was an IRA Volunteer, he did not operate independently. Every single act of torture, interrogation and every single execution was at the behest of the IRA and primarily the IRA Army Council who directed the ISU. In an epistle where Adams could have and should have displayed a modicum of humility and contrition, he chose the detachment and arrogance of the infallible.
More importantly what is absent from the Adams opinion piece is any acknowledgement of the people who carried the cost of the ISU. The men and the women who were abducted, interrogated, brutalised and murdered. Families who continue to demand the truth, real people whose suffering is as real as those families championed by the horde of “relatives’ groups”. When their relatives were murdered by the IRA (not the Brits) families were told by the IRA that they had to absorb their grief and not “create a fuss.” These are the families Adams continues to ignore. His omission of an apology was not an oversight, it was not a neutral position, it was a continued exercise of his power and further demonstration of his god complex.
Similar to other infallible leaders such as Stalin, Churchill et al, Adams’s legacy will be tarnished over time. However diligently Adams and his flock of sycophants attempt to launder the record, history will not be kind to him. No amount of slick suited libel lawyers can supress forever what is already known. Adams was not a peripheral figure nor a passive observer of events that ran beyond his control. He was the leader of a ruthless guerrilla organisation, that included the ISU and the consequences of that leadership are his to own.
For those of us that once believed.
My hero became my leader, he embodied the struggle, the strategy and the endurance that the long war demanded. His clinical ruthlessness, his unbending demeanour and his personal dignity were traits that were admired by even his most ardent enemies at a time when republicans and republicanism were under fire.
In the post ceasefire years, I got to know him, not closely but well enough to confirm the old adage that you should never meet your heroes. Unlike Martin McGuinness, I found Gerry A quite a disagreeable person. Martin always had a smile and a handshake, a most charming man. Gerry was cold and demanded veneration.
To question Gerry now is a deeply uncomfortable reckoning. There is guilt in it and a sense that I am betraying my past self. Like Michael Phillips, when I look in the mirror, the young man, who gave so much, fleetingly looks back at me and wryly informs me that I should have known better.
In castigating The Beard, it hurts and it shames because it necessitates that my past and my present collide reopening old and painful wounds. Silence, however, would extract too great a cost from my conscience and impede my journey of healing.
Q. What is the difference between Gerry Adams and God?
A. God does not think he is Gerry Adams.
There is unique pathology which takes hold of men (mostly men) who have survived history and helped shape destiny. The Emperor Caligula, Stalin and Bonaparte all exhibited the personality traits associated with “God Complex”. God complex is a phenomenon that does not manifest itself as insanity but in an unnerving conviction that events and history can be shaped according to their will.
Deus Vult: God Wills It
Adams, remapped Republicanism, throughout the last period of our conflict. Every road, the armed struggle, negotiations, decommissioning and the peace process ran back through his leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein.
His function now, while no longer Presidential, remains of critical importance to the Sinn Fein project and also his careful curation of his own memory. Writing his own epitaph pre-mortem requires the redrawing of moral and historical boundaries.
Denial and reinvention are now his most trusted weapons. He was adjacent to the IRA but not intimate (allegedly) and therefore not accountable for their actions, he alone had the vision for peace, and he alone possessed the knowhow and cunning to deliver it; and Saint Gerry delivered.
Adams’ gerrymandering of history is slowly unravelling, with every legacy investigation and every time the unburied dead bear inconvenient witness, the truth emerges bit by bit. His commentary increasingly demonstrates that his god complex cannot tolerate such disruption to his well-managed eulogy.
The Andytout News affords Gerry A a weekly platform to share his insight with its few hundred readers, a column which is more akin to a papal edict than an opinion piece in a low brow tabloid. Like the Pope, Adams, who now claims to speak “ex cathedra”, writes with the cadence of infallibility and an arrogant conviction that he is immune from error and shall not be challenged or contradicted. Infallible by definition rather than by argument, for his flatterers, if Gerry says it then it must be so.
While the Church has largely moved away from the idea of Papal infallibility, Gerry surrounds himself with a group of sycophants who cater to his ego and uphold his sense of being infallible. These people are not fools (not all of them), rather opportunists who have learned that proximity to power and wealth necessitates the suspension of curiosity.
Their brownnosing is as dishonest as it is corrosive, but it offers them the comfort of a rationale that the bloodshed while regrettable was also unavoidable, and that the final settlement vindicates us all of guilt or blame. The duty of the gaggle of Adams’ flatterers is to accept the myth, applaud the amnesia and nod through the contradictions while genuflecting at the altar of the peace process.
There is a cost to this parasitic arrangement, and as always it is paid by the victims outside the room, those whose experiences and memories do not align with the infallible former MP for Belfast West. There are claims that critical examination threatens to undermine a nearly 30-year-old ceasefire, and that those who seek transparency or accountability and the truth are opponents of the never-ending peace process.
Saint Gerry does not tolerate heresy, not because heresy is wrong but because it is a reminder that believing in Gerry was always optional and dissent from his teaching may well expose him as an ordinary and fallible human.
No Big Suprise - No Shit Sherlock
In his latest Papal Bull, Adams broaches what should have personally been an awkward subject: Kenova. Unlike the Catholic Church, Adams and the Movement have yet to learn that public opinion can be quickly swivelled by humility, an unconditional admission of guilt and a meaningful apology.
Adams’ piece offers a familiar choreography, written as a bystander, someone who was not central to the creation of the Internal Security Unit and therefore not diminished by its actions. He resurrects the ghosts of Brian Nelson, the securocrats and the RUC to confirm his analysis that the “Kenova revelations come as no big surprise”.
Adams deploys his gravitas and privilege to blame the Brits and assert that, just like the Stevens Investigation, the Brits hindered the Kenova investigation team. No explanation is given as to why the IRA refused to cooperate with Kenova even though the movement now endorses the legitimacy of British policing in this part of Ireland. No clarification is given as to why Sinn Fein provided political cover for Scap for years.
Kenova is contextualised within the comfort zone of British culpability through its perfidious intelligence agencies, yet no similar analysis is provided on the machinery deployed by the IRA to maintain internal security.
Stakeknife was an IRA Volunteer, he did not operate independently. Every single act of torture, interrogation and every single execution was at the behest of the IRA and primarily the IRA Army Council who directed the ISU. In an epistle where Adams could have and should have displayed a modicum of humility and contrition, he chose the detachment and arrogance of the infallible.
More importantly what is absent from the Adams opinion piece is any acknowledgement of the people who carried the cost of the ISU. The men and the women who were abducted, interrogated, brutalised and murdered. Families who continue to demand the truth, real people whose suffering is as real as those families championed by the horde of “relatives’ groups”. When their relatives were murdered by the IRA (not the Brits) families were told by the IRA that they had to absorb their grief and not “create a fuss.” These are the families Adams continues to ignore. His omission of an apology was not an oversight, it was not a neutral position, it was a continued exercise of his power and further demonstration of his god complex.
Similar to other infallible leaders such as Stalin, Churchill et al, Adams’s legacy will be tarnished over time. However diligently Adams and his flock of sycophants attempt to launder the record, history will not be kind to him. No amount of slick suited libel lawyers can supress forever what is already known. Adams was not a peripheral figure nor a passive observer of events that ran beyond his control. He was the leader of a ruthless guerrilla organisation, that included the ISU and the consequences of that leadership are his to own.
For those of us that once believed.
⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.
In my view, the best article featured on TPQ this year - and there has been quite a bit of competition, so that is not something I would say lightly.
ReplyDeletethank you very much for this Mackers, I completed a few online writing courses this year and I hope they are paying off now
ReplyDeleteIt's great writing so there has to be something to recommend about the courses.
DeleteThe piece tallies very much with the type of sentiment expressed in the Aoife Moore book.
The sycophants seemed to do their stuff even without prompting.
Anyone interested in the inversion of a progressive movement will benefit from reading this piece.
The rate at which it is being read is stunning.
A powerful denunciation of what has now become a cult leader, one who stabbed his former comrades in the back.
ReplyDeleteThe Dark tried to warn us, he was bang on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EihfzhaeLm8
An easier way to tell the clay feet gods, especially a Janus, is an IRA member craftily never seeing action, but living (quite nicely, thank you) on the wounds of those who did...
ReplyDeleteHonestly don’t know how you didn’t see it all coming. Ruairi warned you in 1986.
ReplyDeleteEven a cursory glance at Sinn Fein publications post 1986, would tell you it’s all ending in a compromise and talks. As soon as Ruairi left, they were starting moving toward those outwardly compromising positions.
Even reading the publications like starry plough, an glor gafa etc. Sure the GFA even had decommissioning of all weapons in it. Maybe people just believed what they wanted to hear and ignored the facts in front of their eyes.
Undefeated74,
ReplyDeleteHonestly don’t know how you didn’t see it all coming. Ruairi warned you in 1986.
I have always thought all those lines.....
"Too late, too late, shall be the cry".
ReplyDeleteYou were late to the game ('86) so I won't prejudge your motives, and allow perhaps for your age upon joining.
However, Republicanism was excluded in '86 and advanced Nationalists were allowed take control of the Movement. You may have joined the Provisionals but you didn't, to my mind, join the Republican Movement.
Yes, you were a part of the resistance movement as were many others. Many of the folks who signed up in Belfast and Derry were of that ilk, though not all. Many others were Republicans, who were continuing an ongoing campaign for the achievement of the Republic.
Those inside of the 'frontlines' had for the largest part the war visted upon them. Those away from the fray, on the other hand, brought the war to the Brtish; South Armagh, South Derry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh.
Unbeknownst to yourself Muiris you were a member of the Provisional Movement but alas not a member of the Republican one. Rather like Martin & Gerry, not a Republican, but merely an advanced Nationalist.
As it says on the bottom of each page "There's no coming to consciousness without pain"
Most people probably think they made crucial decisions too late in the day, and feel they should have parted the way with projects, movements, jobs, relationships earlier than they did.
DeleteI think looking at at great piece of writing this way doesn't allow for a fuller appreciation of what is being said.
I try to avoid taking the view of 'if only everybody had listened to me.'
The amount of people talking to me about this piece or who have read it by the time I have sent them the link is huge.
Seems there are fewer people left to lie to. Which helps explain why the sycophants are the most strident in lashing out at those who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid.
Yes, it's a skilful piece of writing where Muiris's words demonstrate his astute understanding of the human condition.
DeleteAu contraire, I do appreciate what's being said, I have appreciated it for close on forty years, so much so that I vainly hoped in the early 90's that a "night of the long knives" could possibly come to pass.
Muiris to his credit does reproach himself. Yes, he and so many others ought to have known better. The broad membership ought to have been more diligent when endorsing the Adams/McGuinness leadership's decision to enter partitionist assemblies. It's not after all as if there wasn't plenty of evidence as to the consequences of taking such a turn. Instead, they swallowed the dross spewed out by the personalities and rejected principles. Rejected principles beaten out on the anvil of experience and paid for in blood by previous generations of Republicans,
HJ - the inference seems to be that the acceptance of partitionist assemblies was the albatross that dragged it down, that were it not for that the ship could have sailed on to somewhere other than irrelevance.
DeleteI doubt that was remotely plausible. It was an impossibilist project from the outset.
Everybody involved could have known better including Ruairi.
In my discussions with him I drew a sense that he knew it was a doomed project. The leadership of which he was part had sought ways out as early as September 1971, again in 72 and finally in 1975. It too could not escape the opprobrium from critics of pursuing sops to unionism.
I found Ruairi to be a man of huge integrity but one who also understood the limitations of the brand of republicanism he practiced. His was a fidelity to the past rather than a strategic commitment to the future. Once when I raised the total futility of the Continuity IRA's armed activity he acknowledged it and said it was not about achieving anything but keeping the flame flickering. I didn't feel that was worth risking a life for, told him so, and he sighed heavily.
He had this endearing habit of responding by going to his well stocked library, picking up a book and citing a passage which had great meaning to him. He was a sensitive soul steeped in republican history and tradition.
I always found it demeaning to hear him referred to as a bloodthirsty high priest of republicanism.
Taking on the might of an Empire, albeit in decline, and expecting outright victory was, of course, an improbable outcome. That said, all volunteers, upon enrolment, swore allegiance to the Republic and agreed to obey the orders of superiors. A majority favoured the latter, and others favoured the improbable Republic.
DeleteWas that the primary domino? Possibly not, but certainly it was a very major change in fundamental policy and orientation, one that copper fastened the direction chosen by the careerist cadre.
I lived in Roscommon for a time and was often in the company of Ruairi. He was everything you say and more. Yes, he had fidelity to the past, but was that a weakness? I don't believe so. Any proper developmental process ought include and transcend. Abandoning the past, and excluding corporate wisdom rarely or if ever works.
A fair enough take.
DeleteI just wonder when obeying the orders of superiors who the actual superiors may have been. For a considerable number, the superiors were either Special Branch/MI5/RUC.
I think representative institutions should always be utilised by insurgents. Since the arrival of Gramsci, it seems impossible to effect radical change without participation. Even prior to Gramsci, Lenin was making the same point. Bypass them and society bypasses you. There is something to be said for Rudi Deutsche's long march through the institutions, but as I suggested in an earlier piece the very purpose of that march is to capture the institutions not be captured by them.
I don't think fidelity to the past is a bad thing. I just happen to feel doing what is right for the future is a more productive exercise that needs to have the flexibility not provided by the dead weight of tradition. I try to calculate if the next move will be positive rather than dismiss it out of hand because of past failings.
It seems indisputable that the dominance of the careerist cartel has stymied any serious advance for a progressive project.
Happy New Year
Seeing tradition as a dead weight is only half the story. All societies preserve their histories, even the most primative ones. That suggests there's an adaptive dimention. The adaptive function is that we learn from our mistakes and affirm our successes.
DeleteHappy '26
I tend to go with Marx on it: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."
DeleteThe histories of many societies are founded on foundational myths.
Both positions are true, but point to different sides of the same coin. One cautionary, the other, though embellished, essentially affirmative.
DeleteI am not sure that if people had listened to Ruairi in 86 or Brendan in 96 the outcomes would have been much different. The ceasefire was inevitable,(and overdue) and so was a negotiated settlement. What might have been different is how it would have been handled. Probably there would have been a level of honesty, and transparency. This is what the article is about, truth, honesty and abuse of power. It is as erroneous to worship at the altar of Ruairi and Brendan as it is to venerate Adams.
ReplyDeleteIt would arguably have made no difference. The constraints were too numerous to overcome. The Republic was an impossibilist goal given the composition of forces arrayed across the protagonists.
DeleteIt all could have been handled much better but transparency was anathema to those intent on turning an insurrectionary movement into a careerist cabal.
@Muiris
DeleteIan Robinson's "The Winner Effect" is quite effective in explaining how, for some, the power trip can corrupt. It runs on the same neurological circuits as addictions—no surprises then on the absence of honesty or a lack of transparency.
Though never a member of the Provisional movement Adam's smile was always false to me. It was never what the man said but the way he said it and got away with it. Something very strange about his interviews, BBC mid eighties he was explaining the IRAs attack on crown forces, while smoking his pipe, stating; "there is a war on". This explanation was correct but how did he feel confident enough to go on enemy TV and walk away? Many questions such as this over the years.
ReplyDeleteCaoimhin, if Scap was considered a Golden Egg, who then might have been the Golden Goose?
DeleteYou might reluctantly have had to sacrifice the occasional egg but you'd go to any length to protect the goose, even tampering with the munitions of assassins!