Editorial: ​Labour buckles again on legacy, now on Adams

​Gerry Adams is now likely to get compensation for being interned.

This leader of a fanatical, sectarian republican movement that caused such division, hatred and heartbreak in Northern Ireland will be eligible for damages from UK taxpayers due to a contemptible Supreme Court ruling.

Adams, we should make clear, was never in the IRA. Almost everyone who follows NI events closely thinks he was not only in the IRA but one of its leaders. But he says its violence, which lasted 30 years, was essential but he himself did not get involved.

The Supreme Court quashed the ex Sinn Fein president’s convictions for trying to escape the Maze prison, finding he had not been legally interned in 1973 because his detention had not been considered by the then NI secretary, William Whitelaw. But legislation that brought in internment, as terror was escalating, specifically let junior ministers authorise detention.

Not one Supreme Court judge dissented from the ruling written by the ex NI lord chief justice, the late Lord Kerr. We were one of the few media outlets to report the outrage this ruling caused among some of the most distinguished legal and political minds in the land, among them Richard Ekins, Oxford University law professor, or Lord Butler, ex head of UK civil service, or Lord Howell, an NIO minister in the 1970s.

The then Tory government was slow to act on their demands for immediate change in the law to make clear that then government did have the legal ability to delegate decisions on internment, but it did block retrospective compensation in its Legacy Act. Now Hilary Benn and Keir Starmer are scrapping the act and that clause.

It was the ex Ireland rugby player and longtime reconciliation activist Trevor Ringland who wrote on these pages in 2020 that the Adams Supreme Court ruling “walked on graves of judges murdered by IRA”. So it did.