PITY POOR Gerry Adams. Once he stood atop the world, a peacemaker lauded in palaces and parliaments, now he is looking more tired and grubby with every passing month.
The Northern Bank robbery and killing of Robert McCartney were the events that started to loosen the wheels on the Sinn Féin bandwagon and since then things have gone from bad to worse. While the party still dominates republicanism in the North, its Southern voter base has slipped badly with many blaming Adams personally for the party’s ailing fortunes.
The allegations against Adam’s brother Liam and Adams’s own alleged role in not reporting him to the authorities hurt him and now there are most ghosts from the troubled past rising up to stalk the Sinn Féin president.
The late republican Brendan ‘the Dark’ Hughes has claimed in a testimony now opened after his death, reported by Ed Moloney in his new book ‘Voices From The Grave’, that Adams personally gave the order to kill Jean McConville in 1972, one of the IRA’s most controversial acts during the conflict.
The notoriously anti-republican Irish media has already gone to town with the allegations but the hypocrisy of the Irish press is no reason to assume Hughes wasn’t speaking the truth.
Sinn Féin’s response was swift and dismissive.
“I knew Brendan Hughes well. Better than Ed Moloney,” he said. “He wasn’t well and hadn’t been for a very long time, including during the time he did these interviews. Brendan also opposed the IRA cessations and the peace process. That was his right.”
“I reject absolutely any accusation that I had any hand or part in the killing and disappearing of Jean McConville or in any of the other allegations that are being promoted by Ed Moloney.”
In fact it is impossible to know whether or not Hughes was telling the truth. Adams is correct that Hughes was unwell but seems to be alluding to Hughes’s alleged chronic alcoholism. There is also the fact that Hughes may well have borne a grudge against the IRA leadership – he certainly wouldn’t be the first aging IRA member to do so.
Adams and Hughes were longtime friends, their acquaintance forged in the crucible of the conflict. The two men had known each other since the early 1970s and were interned together in Long Kesh. Adams acted as pall bearer at Hughes funeral.
The problem is, Adams’s dismissal would carry a lot more weight if he actually admitted that he was ever in the IRA at all – the Sinn Féin president has always denied membership of the IRA, something the vast majority of people find rather difficult to swallow.
McConville was the highest profile of ‘the disappeared’, people secretly executed by the Provisional IRA whose bodies were then hidden. The IRA did not acknowledge responsibility for the killing for two decades.
The story is not just Adams denials of being in the IRA but the fact that he met with McConville’s family in recent years to discuss the ongoing search for her body. In 2003 her body was found by members of the public while they were walking on Shelling Hill beach in County Louth.
The story is more complicated than it first sounds, though. Hughes’s account of events also suggests British government guilt: the IRA claimed she was an informer but her family say she was killed because she came to the aid of a wounded soldier.
Hughes says she was caught with a transmitter in her home and warned, caught again and then shot dead.
If Hughes is to be believed that Adams ordered her ‘disappearance’ (he says the Belfast leadership was agreed she had to be killed) then surely he should also be believe that she was in fact a spy, whether voluntarily or coerced. In fact, if she was coerced then the role of the British establishment looks even worse.
The killing of McConville was a politically difficult task for the IRA.
She was a Catholic convert, widow and mother of ten – three facts that made a normal execution difficult for the IRA leadership. As an erstwhile Protestant there would have certainly been voices claiming an assassination was in fact a sectarian killing. As a widow and mother of a young family, her killing was likely to have been unpopular in republican areas of Belfast.
In 1974 one of McConville’s sons was imprisoned for Official IRA activity. He later joined the INLA.
The revelations come just in time for the British general election in which Adams will be seeking to defend his west Belfast parliamentary seat, held on the traditional Sinn Féin abstentionist ticket.
It won’t have any effect on Adams in terms of the forthcoming general election but it will add to the pressure on Adams to step down as Sinn Féin president. Many within the party want to see a Southern leader in order to boost the vote in the 26 counties but another reason for choosing a new president would be to find a leader with no skeletons in his closet.
Sinn Féin cannot speak the simple truth on the issue whether or not Adams was responsible: terrible things happen in conflicts. Instead the party must make history itself disappear.
(1) Adams denies McConville claim, Dan Keenan, Irish Times, March 29, 2010
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