Alex Kane: Loved and loathed, but who is the real Gerry Adams?

Gerry Adams is one of those politicians about whom there is very little evidence of shrugging-of-the-shoulders indifference.

Ask most people what they think of him and you’ll get a very clear opinion; love and loathing in equal measure. I can’t even remember the last time anyone said something like, “Well, to be honest Alex, I really don’t know what to make of him.”

Indeed, one of the most interesting opinions I ever heard about him was from a very senior DUP member in the autumn of 2007 (a few months after the DUP and Sinn Fein agreed their power-sharing deal): “Having to sell McGuinness as deputy first minister was always going to be difficult for us. I wouldn’t even have tried had it been Adams. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s always been something about the man ...”.

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And maybe that’s what sums him up best. There always has been something about him. Fifty years on and he still denies he was ever a member of the Provisional IRA. Everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink, has been thrown at him about his serial denials, including on-the-record testimony from people who say they remember him being a member and ‘being in the room’ when decisions were made. Yet to some extent it doesn’t actually matter if he was a member. You don’t acquire the status and influence he had with the organisation if you weren’t totally trusted by the key players and totally supportive of the terror campaign.

Gerry Adams has a complete inability to even try and understand unionismGerry Adams has a complete inability to even try and understand unionism
Gerry Adams has a complete inability to even try and understand unionism

He was at the very heart of PIRA from December 1969/January 1970: not as some sort of go-between between it and successive government and intelligence back-channel contacts, but in the role of key strategist and, when necessary, justifier of the campaign and rewriter of history; “The IRA had a great deal of popular support when it was in its ascendancy and its capacity to conduct a war against the British. It’s still my view that the use of armed actions in the given circumstances is a legitimate response.”

It may be Danny Morrison who is now remembered for first uttering the ballot box/Armalite mantra in November 1981 (a line which would never have been delivered at SF’s ard fheis without the nod of approval from Adams) but it was Adams who, in the words of author Ken Wharton, used the 1981 Hunger Strike ‘... for the emergence of Sinn Fein as a major political party ... the making of Gerry Adams, who was able to present himself as a statesman, the leader of a previously insignificant political party that had once masqueraded as the political wing of the IRA’.

And it was Adams – irrespective of whether or not he ever belonged to the IRA – who thereafter stood over a political/electoral strategy in which a calculated campaign of continuing murder and bombing went hand in hand with broader calculations about ending abstentionism and making it known that the IRA was up for the right sort of political/constitutional settlement.

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A bigger question – one which unionists have tended to shy away from – is why successive UK governments since 1981 (Thatcher, Major and Blair) indulged and encouraged the outworkings of something as blatantly immoral and brutally cynical as the ballot box/Armalite strategy.

Adams’ announcement that he wouldn’t be contesting his Louth seat in the forthcoming Irish election – coming just two years after standing down as Sinn Fein’s president – marks the end of his ‘formal’ political career. That said, and to paraphrase an infamous comment from him, “I probably won’t go away, you know”. He leaves an awful lot of unanswered questions behind him, making it extraordinarily difficult to know what to make of his legacy.

For example, did he spend years trying to persuade the IRA to end the terror campaign, or did he simply exploit the campaign for personal political ends? Does he deserve to be remembered as someone who brought peace to Northern Ireland, or as someone who delayed a peace process until he had won what he wanted in terms of being able to continue with Irish unity by other means? The IRA’s primary targets were always unionists and defenders of unionism in Northern Ireland: the very people Sinn Fein now talks about ‘reaching out to’.

And while Sinn Fein has spent decades complaining about unionist ‘misrule’, there hasn’t, in fact, been a unionist government since March 1972. Yet the terror campaign continued. Does Adams even care about what unionists think; indeed, has he ever cared?

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As someone who has observed Adams since the 1981 hunger strike onwards – the time when most people outside Sinn Fein and intelligence back-channel circles first became aware of him – I’ve never been entirely sure what motivates him, other than Irish unity. But one thing I have been certain of, though, is his complete inability to even try and understand unionism. I’ve never had any sense of sincerity when he talks about outreach or accommodation; never a feeling that he actually gives a damn about unionist heritage or sense of identity when, as he hopes, partition ends and Northern Ireland ceases to exist. Surprisingly, perhaps, I don’t think that’s true of every key player in Sinn Fein. But with him, it just sticks out; which doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.

I hope he leaves behind a memoir which answers those, so far, unanswered questions. As someone who has played a very significant role – beginning as, to all intents and purposes, the 1969 equivalent of a dissident republican – in the shaping and reshaping of both armed and constitutional republicanism in Northern Ireland, I’d like to know his own thought processes, rather than rely on just the interpretations of his opponents and hagiographers. The brilliant political impressionist Mike Yarwood used to end every show with the words, ‘And this is me’. At the age of 71 I’m not sure that anyone – maybe even those closest to him – really knows the real Gerry Adams.