The civil case against Gerry Adams fizzled out last week, just as many suspected it would. In that narrow respect, I find myself on the unfamiliar ground of agreeing with Adams and Sinn Féin that the case should never have reached the courts. That, however, is where any agreement ends. My own view is simpler: no one should ever again find themselves in the dock over a conflict that ended almost thirty years ago.
I am no lawyer, and I have genuine sympathy for the three victims of the IRA who brought the case. But they appear to have been badly advised and insufficiently alert to the financial risks that civil litigation carries.
I know nothing of how the case began. I can only take the plaintiffs at their word: that they were innocent victims of the IRA seeking the same truth and justice that should be available to all who suffered during the conflict.
Having followed the proceedings closely, I was struck by how thin the evidence against Adams actually was. Stripped of presentation and theatre, it amounted largely to repetition: material long in circulation, drawn from public sources, and allegations that have persisted for decades without substantiation, many of them traceable to British military and RUC Special Branch briefings. John Ware aside, there was little that could honestly be described as new, and even less that could be described as probative. On the few occasions when Adams came under pressure in the witness box, I admit I felt a brief flicker of schadenfreude. It did not last. The reality remained that this was a British court.
It came as no surprise that former IRA figures who had served alongside Adams were not prepared to appear in a British court to testify against him. That remained true even of those who had since broken with the strategy he led or had criticised him publicly. For Irish republicans, participation in a British court attempting to adjudicate on the legitimacy or conduct of the armed struggle remains a line that is not crossed.
In that context, Shane Paul cut a sad and isolated figure, separated from a wider tradition which, whatever its internal quarrels, still maintains its red lines.
The fact that the trial was years in the making gave Adams and Sinn Féin ample time to choreograph their response. The arrival at court in a top-of-the-range Land Rover, wearing an Israeli-made bulletproof vest and accompanied by a security team using Israeli-made communications equipment, was a mistake. The choice of public-facing security personnel was deliberate. It included men who had played a central role in policing the peace and suppressing dissent in Belfast. The message was understood.
Adams had raised the stakes even before proceedings began, issuing a carefully worded statement pre-trial in which, he said, his primary concern was for the victims, while insinuating that they had been manipulated by darker forces intent on advancing the case. He cast it as a full-frontal assault by the British establishment on the legitimacy of the republican struggle.
Safe in the knowledge that this was not, in fact, what the case was, Adams doubled down on the same performance on the opening day outside the court. Saint Gerry of the peace process was once again being victimised by perfidious Albion. It was not Gerry on trial, we were invited to believe, but the republican struggle itself, of which he was merely the embodiment, guilty only of being an Irish republican.
The evidence presented against him told a different story. Had either the British or Irish governments wanted this case to succeed, they could have strategically leaked contemporaneous documents from multiple sources to help make that happen, not least material from figures such as Scappaticci or “Wee Roy”, Gerry’s former driver. The outcome of the case was always set to vindicate not just Adams, but the peace process and both governments that underwrote it.
And that is the heart of it. The case, the evidence, and the outcome changed no one’s mind. Not about the legitimacy of the armed struggle, and not about who or what Gerry Adams was, or remains. Like many others, I do not need a British court to tell me what I know, or what I do not know.
What the case did confirm was something else: the extent to which Adams is prepared to construct and defend a legacy as a man of peace. He is not a foolish man. Given months to prepare, his evidence was delivered without error. There were no slips, no deviations, no uncertainty.
He joined Sinn Féin. It was separate from the IRA. He was never in the IRA. Former comrades were recast as liars or disappointments. Presidents, prime ministers and Taoisigh were mistaken. He had delivered the peace process to the British “on a plate” and, in doing so, had brought the IRA to heel. Resentment followed. The allegation that he had been a member of the IRA was framed not as history, but as smear. He was, he insisted, a man of peace, not an IRA volunteer.
At times, I was unsure whether we were part of the same movement. Sinn Féin was always an army project, even at the point when I left. That was understood internally, whatever was said publicly.
Some of the commentary now circulating, often from those who should know better, suggests otherwise. It reflects not confusion, but revisionism. The past is being recast by people who were either not there or not yet lucid enough to understand what it was they were looking at.
Within the movement, to say that someone was a member of the IRA was never a smear. Many regret their involvement. Very few are ashamed of it. Fewer still would have described it as an unpleasant or false accusation.
That is why the spectacle of former IRA volunteers now supporting Adams, as he recasts IRA membership as a smear, is so difficult to reconcile. It is not ambiguity. It is contradiction, openly stated.
The contradictions were once again visible as Gerry delivered his valedictory speech on returning to Belfast. Standing beneath a mural of IRA Volunteer Bobby Sands, he again asserted that he had never been in the IRA. Behind him stood Sinn Féin MPs and MLAs, arranged and attentive, their presence signalling adulation and loyalty.
At the same time, multiple Sinn Féin TDs, MLAs and MPs issued near-identical statements across social media. Only Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill diverged. The message was uniform: Gerry had gone to the belly of the beast and struck another blow for Irish freedom.
Gerry repeated his concern for the victims who had brought the case. If it was delivered sincerely, it sat uneasily with the reality that one of those involved in planting the bombs stood alongside him.
And so it ended.
⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.
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