Belfast Telegraph
What do you think now, America?

By Steven King

IN all the furore about Ed Moloney's new book, A Secret History of the
IRA, one question has not so far been asked: what is the impact of the
book likely to be Stateside? The book is designed to have a strong
appeal in America. Regrettably, the book opens with a very conventional
nationalist interpretation of Irish history and the causes of the rise
of Sinn Fein and the IRA.

The role of unionism barely gets a mention and when it does Moloney
overplays historic privilege, ignoring the similarity in working-class
Protestant and Catholic social conditions in the 19th century. But that
will do no harm to Moloney's sales in the US where there is some
fascination with Gerry Adams.

But what will the reaction be to a passage like this? - "The use of the
human bomb did not begin when al-Qaida hijackers pointed passenger jets
at the towers of the World Trade Center or when Hamas blew themselves
and scores of Israeli partygoers to pieces. It began in Derry a decade
before."

Of course, IRA human bombs, unlike those of Hamas, involved no risk to
the IRA themselves. No wonder they inflicted almost 60% of the
casualties during the Troubles while suffering only 13% themselves.

Moloney concludes: "The IRA leadership, including Adams, was capable of
saying that negative consequences had resulted from, for example,
placing a bomb on a school bus, yet they had unhesitatingly supported a
tactic that involved forcing a father of three to drive a huge bomb to
an Army base and then, before he had the chance to escape, blowing him
to smithereens."

How too will Adams' rich American friends react to the account of the
republican leadership's "swing to the left" and the murderous campaign
against businessmen that followed?

It has been an odd public relations battle so far. Moloney has lauded
Adams as a strategic genius who should have got a Nobel Peace Prize.
Adams, mortally offended, says he is consulting his lawyers.

But Adams has reason to be offended. The book subverts the pompous
moralistic image of Adams created by the Sinn Fein press office.

A recent issue of VIP magazine describes Adams as an "innocent" figure.
But if only 10% of what prize-winning journalist Moloney has written is
true he is far from innocent. "So what?" you say, "We all knew that."
But did Adams?

Is he perhaps in some form of denial?

Frankly, Adams reminds me of Maurice Papon, released from a French gaol
last week where he was serving time for his part in deporting Jews to
the concentration camps during the German occupation.

Papon had so brilliantly reinvented himself as an adviser to President
Mitterrand that he genuinely could not believe he was guilty of the
charges put to him relating to his actions of four decades earlier.

So it is that Adams, who is so given to pious morality lectures about
everyone else's responsibilities, knows that the murder of a mother of
ten is a horrible act but cannot believe he had anything to do with it.

Similarly, Martin McGuinness was caught by surprise on American radio
recently when a tape of his own voice from 30 years ago was played
suggesting that those injured by IRA car bombs had only themselves to blame.

For a moment it seemed he genuinely could not recognise his own voice.

For Maurice Papon, at 92 and in failing health, the problem of facing up
to one's own past is nearly over. For Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness
it is only just beginning.

A cruel forgetfulness

No-one raises an eyebrow as we celebrate an Nazi sympathiser

Henry McDonald
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer

IN THE NORTH inner city of a cosmopolitan EU capital stands a statue erected in honour of a Nazi collaborator. A candidate for the European Parliament makes a speech at a commemoration beside the sculpture in honour of the militant nationalist who colluded with Hitler. Fifty-eight years after the concentration camps were liberated, doors to the gas chambers flung open, mass murder pits exhumed and the systematic programme of genocide exposed, a political party with ambitions to take a seat in a democratic forum born from the ashes of Europe's inferno comes to pay homage to an unapologetically of Nazism.
If this scenario had taken place in Paris, Rome, Brussells or, worst of all, Berlin, there would have been an outcry on the scale of the Waldheim scandal when the former President of Austria somehow 'forgot' about this Nazi past. Imagine if a would-be MEP from the Front National, Allianze Nationale or the Vlams Blok had spoken beside a memorial dedicated to the French, Italian and Belgium allies of Nazi Germany during the war. Current and prospective MEPs would be rushing to condemn the actions of the wannabe Euro-parliamentarian. Jewish and left-wing groups would be demanding. But this capital, this statue, this candidate happen to be in the Republic of Ireland, where some very uncomfortable facts of twentieth century history are either distorted or simply airbrushed out.

It is 1940 and somewhere under the sea off the Irish western coastline the chief-of-staff of the IRA lies dying in a German U-boat. A plan to disrupt Britain's war effort, a democracy, albeit flawed and imperialistic, is fighting for its survival. Between the outbreak of war and the death of Sean Russell more than 300 IRA bombs have exploded in Britain and Northern Ireland. Six British civilians are killed in Coventry, a city the Luftwaffe pulverised. The IRA is in league with one of the vilest regimes in human history. England's difficulty may be Ireland's opportunity but their Nazi friends intend to enslave the whole of Europe. And in less than two years they draw up a death list of every Jewish man, woman and child, including 3,700 Irish Jews - an unprecedented inventory of evil.

Fast forward then 58 years to the twenty-first century on a Saturday afternoon at the end of August in a park overlooking Dublin Bay. Sinn Fein EU candidate for the capital Mary Lou McDonald is sharing a platform with IRA veteran Brian Keenan, who at one stage praises Sean Russell as someone who preferred freedom to slavery. The crowd who have come to hear the speeches gather round Russell's statue, a man trained by the Nazis in Berlin, an ally in Hitler's project to conquer all of Europe, a chief saboteur of the war effort aimed at defeating this vast bloody experiment in racial purification. An Phoblacht/Republic News reports the Sean Russell commemoration without any irony let alone a reference to the IRA/Nazi alliance of 1939-45.

Racist buffoons like Jean-Marie Le Pen dismiss the death camps as a 'detail of history'. Slicker fascists like Jorg Haidar 'admire' Hitler's employment policies and attend get-togethers of old SS thugs who in the words of the poet James Fenton get together every year to forget about the old times. The liberal-Left media across the EU call for Le Pen's FN to be ostracised in the European Parliament and the Austrian state turned into an international pariah for its inclusion of Haidar's People's Party in the Vienna government. Yet no one in the same liberal-Left media in Ireland, specifically in RTE or the Irish Times , bats an eyelid about the Sean Russell commemoration. No-one dares field even one awkward question to a potential MEP, who proclaims to be on the radical Left, about her attendance at a rally in memory of an admirer of the Nazis. No-one gets the incongruity of someone supposedly on the Left paying homage to a man that would have gladly handed over Ireland to the Third Reich.

It is 2003 and to borrow Milan Kundera's phrase, the struggle of man against power is still the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Henry.mcdonald@observer.co.uk
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1037101,00.html

Telegraph
IRA 'provoked troops on Bloody Sunday'
By Thomas Harding, Ireland Correspondent
(Filed: 16/06/2003)

The Provisional IRA deliberately provoked troops during the civil rights march on Bloody Sunday in an attempt to win support for their violent tactics, the daughter of a former Sinn Fein vice-president said yesterday.

Deirdre McNamara has remained silent for almost three decades about the conversation she had with her father, Derry Kelleher, in which he described the Provisionals' strategy of seeking a united Ireland by force.

Ms McNamara claims her attempts to bring this knowledge to the attention of Lord Saville's inquiry on Bloody Sunday met with no response.

The IRA has always maintained that it never fired upon paratroopers when they entered the Bogside in Londonderry in 1972 and shot dead 13 demonstrators.

But Ms McNamara's recollection of her father's remarks appears to support the evidence of a number of soldiers at the Bloody Sunday inquiry that they started shooting only after coming under fire.

She says he told her that the IRA "planned the opportunity" to provoke the Paras to fire into a mainly unarmed crowd and win a major propaganda coup.

Ms McNamara, a homeopathic doctor living in New York, contacted the Bloody Sunday inquiry almost three years ago and sent a letter to the British Consulate in New York saying she had "important information". But the inquiry appears not to have acted on her approach.

In her first interview on the subject, Ms McNamara told The Telegraph about the conversation with her father, who was Official Sinn Fein's vice-president from 1971-72, at their home in Co Wicklow, in the Irish Republic.

"My father said that the Provies had deliberately used the civil rights march in Derry as a staging ground to escalate the tensions in Northern Ireland to provoke violence," she said. "It was used to launch their campaign of violence and cement their standing in the republican community divided by those for and against military action. He gave me to understand that they had provoked the violence.

"It is consistent with the IRA's ethos of misinformation that they set up the British Army with a campaign of lies and rumours. I knew the significance of what he was saying but I was trying to run away from it all at that time.

"I am aware that I am taking a great risk in speaking out against those psychos who maim children in the name of freedom."

Ms McNamara fell out with her family and moved in her twenties to New York, where she worked as an actress.

She said her father, who died two years ago, was trying to recruit her into the Officials by saying the Provisionals were bent on violence.

The split within the IRA happened in late 1969. The Provisionals were impatient to eject the British using violence but the Officials, while still using violence, were becoming more drawn to a political path.

By the end of 1972 the Provisionals became a focal point of young republicans, with Bloody Sunday a major factor in providing recruits, leaving the way open to carry on its murderous campaign. Ms McNamara, who believes her father was in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday and knew Martin McGuinness, then the Provisionals' second in command, says she gave careful thought on whether to come forward because of fears for her own and her children's lives. She also has several relatives in the IRA.

"I thought, would anyone believe me and would I be in danger by coming forward? I worry because I have children."

It remains unclear whether the Bloody Sunday team will take a statement from her.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$A1SXALQVLN1IJQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2003/06/16/nblud16.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/06/16/ixnewstop.html

Sunday Times
March 14, 2004

Comment: Liam Clarke: Massacre shows hypocrisy of new, peaceful Sinn Fein

My first thought on hearing of the Madrid massacre was of my son Daniel who works in the city and travels to and from Atocha station, which was devastated in the attacks, each day.
He had lost friends in the Omagh bomb and witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Coleraine. Could he now become a casualty himself? How would it affect him and us? Thankfully he was safe in bed when we phoned. As luck would have it he was working late that day, but it brought home how easily our lives could have been changed by a matter of chance. There was a guilty, disquieting, relief that other people’s lives were wrecked and not ours.

This feeling slid quickly into empathy with the Spanish victims and their families, and a deeper realisation of their loss. Others reacted in the same, basically selfish, way and were most touched by the possible fate of those closest to them. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the distinguished commentator with the London Independent and a Muslim, thought first of Spanish Muslims. She hoped that ETA, the Basque separatists, and not Al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks so that there would be no backlash against her co-religionists or against her on visits to see the Moorish sites in southern Spain.

This concern for the rights of innocent Muslims, or for innocent Basques if ETA turns out to have been responsible, would have been most effective coming from a Madrileño.

In Spain, of course, it was harder to escape the enormity of what had actually happened. There, a less squeamish press published and broadcast images of dead bodies — including that of a dead mother and child — in a way our papers and television stations seldom do. In Ireland we tend to airbrush out the harsher details just as we allow our politicians to draw a veil over their seamy or violent pasts. We call it sensitivity.

Gerry Adams is a man who, throughout the IRA campaign, condemned nothing so strongly as condemnation itself. Any time he could get on television he railed against “the politics of condemnation” and told journalists they were wasting their time trying to get him to join in with it. “Knee-jerk reactions” to violent death, he argued, solved nothing. Condemnation, he suggested, was itself reprehensible. The reason he said this was that he was a member of the IRA and he depended on its support.

He managed to hold his nose and utter the C-word when it was expedient to do so, which was after loyalist, security force or INLA attacks. In the wake of Provisional IRA atrocities Adams made himself scarce, leaving minions to act as crash-test dummies in front of the media and public. Often the results would have been comical if the circumstances had not been so tragic. Following the Enniskillen bombing a Sinn Fein councillor was asked to condemn it and said he wanted to see who claimed it before making any comment.

There was no need for such delay and no wait for evidence last week when the Sinn Fein leader was “knee-jerking” with the best of them. “Adams condemns Madrid bombings” announced the headline of Sinn Fein’s statement. Adams made no appeal for understanding of the grievances of those who perpetrate terrorism or for dialogue to end it. He simply said: “This is an appalling act. It is wrong and those involved should stop.”

His reaction after 9/11 was the same — no mention of the evils of the Middle East or Sinn Fein’s reservations about American foreign policy making the world a more dangerous place, just “total condemnation”. It would be nice to think of this as a simple moral progression from the days when condemning terrorism was a dirty word, but only Pollyanna would look at it like that.

The fact is that Adams depends on American financial and political backing and he is on his way to Washington this week.

There he will face pressure from the administration and from Irish America to back the police, do away with the IRA, decommission its armoury and enter wholeheartedly into the democratic process.

Adams doesn’t want to be tarred with the terrorist brush, which would weaken his hand politically. That is why he is denying that he was ever in the IRA, even though he has published a book of articles from his time as “officer commanding” Provisional republican detainees in cage 11 at the Maze. Our press and television stations often prefer not to focus on the details and collude in his denials, just as they turn the cameras away from the Spanish bodies.

In the wake of horrors like the Madrid massacre, like September 11, like Omagh, like the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and like Enniskillen, there is a need for less “sensitivity” and more joined-up thinking. As the historian JM Thompson wrote, in his history of the French Revolution, the truth is that “means debase ends”.

Causes suffer and their rationales are undermined when they are served by such methods. Political violence, like war, may sometimes be justified as the lesser of two evils in conditions of tyranny where governments will not respond to public opinion. The history of the 20th century shows that many conflicts sanctioned by states are not the lesser of two evils, but some undoubtedly are.

Terrorist attacks to influence public opinion in western democracies do not, whatever the motivation of the perpetrators, fall into the category of justifiable use of violence. The evil they introduce is itself the issue and it destroys any moral argument that may serve the underlying political cause. The organisations using such violence inevitably deteriorate.

To inspire others to carry out terrorist attacks, and face death or imprisonment, the leadership of terrorist groups must adopt absolutist positions with no room for moral equivocation or doubt. Often religious fanaticism or racial hatred are called upon to stiffen morale and make the thought of compromise more reprehensible. This leads either to defeat or a sell-out of the principles for which others have died.

We only have to think of the middle-aged and elderly men who send young men and women to their deaths as suicide bombers and the coarsening of sensibility, the selfish preservation of their own interests at the cost of the lives of others, which this involves. Closer to home it is possible to think of the victims of IRA violence, the IRA members who have died or gone to jail and the eventual decision of the surviving leadership to accept a compromise that, in its essentials, was available to them at the outset of their campaign.

The whole baggage of IRA violence now drags Sinn Fein down. Adams denies his former comrades, the weapons themselves become an issue and there is a need for ideological contortions to avoid accusations of sell-out. A united Ireland appears no closer than in the early 1970s, despite the bloodshed.

The argument for greater Basque autonomy, for the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, for a united Ireland or for a separate Palestinian homeland cannot be advanced by attacks in countries where these causes can be argued politically. That the argument does not prevail is no justification for any course of action beyond looking again at the validity of the argument and its presentation.

It is tempting in the face of terror to avoid these hard facts, or to say that negotiation is always the answer for governments faced with such threats. However, the Irish experience shows that negotiation can only be effective when the terrorist violence has been shown to have failed.

The political offers that the Provos settled for were always on the table. They were only accepted when other options were closed off by the efforts of the security forces and the weight of public opinion.

The correct attitude in such circumstances was brought home to me by Gorka Landabaru, a radical Basque journalist whose family were exiled from Spain for their left-wing and nationalist views under the Franco dictatorship.

The Landabarus may have suffered as a result of the repression of Basque nationalism, but Gorka was not embittered enough to support ETA violence within a democratic Spain. A gifted and charismatic commentator, he wrote against it in a series of searing newspaper columns.

In 2001 he lost five fingers and the sight of one eye to an ETA parcel bomb which also left him partially deaf.

“Don’t worry,” he told me, after giving a speech on terrorism and the media in Bilbao, “they got my hands — but they didn’t get my mouth.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2765-1037367,00.html

irish independent
Sinn Fein: still in the shadow of the gunmen?

There's a joke in Northern politics that when Sinn Féin leaders talk to the IRA they merely slip into the next room and converse with themselves in the mirror.

It's a joke with more than a grain or truth. Or none at all. It depends on who you ask. Republicanism's private double life is a source of endless speculation and debate. Was Gerry an IRA member? Are current senior Sinn Fein figures - "household names", according to Michael McDowell - still on the IRA army council.

Sinn Féin's Armalite and ballot box past is proving difficult to shake off. The events of the last three weeks have focused attention on the party's bona fides - in the Republic, at any rate - in a way which hasn't happened since the peace process began.

Suddenly the wheels are coming off Sinn Féin's shadowy double act. Not even the IRA denies that its people were involved in the attempted abduction of Bobby Tohill. Police in the North say the Provisionals have carried out some 50 punishment beatings and shootings in the past year. The Government here is hinting strongly that the IRA is engaged in criminality in Dublin Port. The Taoiseach has talked of racketeering in petrol and vodka.

Curiously, however, the issue which could cause Sinn Féin most grief in the June elections has less to do with violent crime than it has with basic truth and lies - Gerry Adams's Republican past. Despite the Sinn Féin leader's vehement denials that he was in the IRA, the fact is that hardly anyone believes him.

Observers on all sides are keen to point out the dilemma Adams now finds himself in. If people don't believe he is telling the truth about his own Republican past, what else might he not be telling the truth about? How are voters to know that his party really has moved on from Republicanism's violent past? What are they to make of the allegations that Sinn Féin's blood brothers are still up to their necks in crime?

"Some people are a bit mystified as to why Gerry Adams's past has suddenly become an issue in the South," says one Northern observer. "Others think it should have been an issue a long time ago. It's a terrific tactic by Bertie Ahern, implicitly attacking his credibility, a neat twist. And it could have an effect at the polls."

The Madrid massacre, and the IRA's close ties with ETA, will further add to the discomfort of Sinn Féin canvassers on the doorsteps in the coming three months. The parallels with past IRA atrocities are obvious; only the scale is different.

Intelligence services on both sides of the border have their own view of the links between Sinn Féin and the IRA - one which goes way beyond quips about rooms and mirrors. The gardaí and PSNI believe that four of the current IRA army council's seven members are senior Sinn Féin figures. In referring to "household names", Michael McDowell could hardly have said more without actually naming them.

In April 2001, the DUP's Peter Robinson did name names, under the protection of parliamentary privilege in the House of Commons. He alleged that the seven members of the army council at that time were Thomas 'Slab' Murphy, Brian Keenan, Martin McGuinness, Gerard Adams, Martin Ferris, Patrick Doherty and Brian Gillen.

Unionists believe Gerry Adams was the IRA's commander in Belfast on Bloody Friday in July 1972, when at least 20 bombs ripped through the city in a little over an hour, killing nine people and seriously injuring 130. This is something which Adams has frequently denied. An entire generation has grown up since that awful day. Many of those who intend voting for Sinn Féin in June will not recall that event, for the simple reason that in 1972 they weren't yet born.

From a Unionist perspective, it is simply inconceivable that Adams was not in the IRA at that time. One source says: "The Republican movement for years and years has claimed that in the early 1970s there was no alternative to violent action. If that is the case, then the question has to be asked: why wasn't he a member? Unionists assume that he's still a member, that he is on the army council. They have no reason to believe that he isn't."

Another says: "His denial that he was in the IRA suggests that, amid all the chaos and turmoil of the North, he somehow managed to maintain an aloof detachment from his neighbours and contemporaries over three decades. For a man who prides himself on facing up to political realities, there is a very strong air of unreality about his denial."

His political opponents point to photographs from the early 1970s of Adams, walking in line with other men in black berets beside the coffin of an IRA member killed while planting a bomb. "If he wasn't a member," says one observer wryly, "his choice of head gear on such an occasion was a most unfortunate one, not to mention it being an astonishing coincidence."

Amid the controversy about Adams's past, however, it is important not to lose sight of his immense contribution to the peace. Under his political leadership, the Republican movement has transformed itself. Provisional IRA shootings and murders, once routine, have long ago stopped; the bloody bomb atrocities are now consigned to the past.

Responding to whether Adams was an IRA man, Sinn Féin's director of publicity, Richard McAuley says: "All Gerry can do is repeat his position ad nauseam to those who keep asking the question, knowing the answer they're going to get. People then make a judgment about who they believe or what they think is important in all this."

McAuley insists that allegations that senior Sinn Féin figures, including Adams and McGuinness, were or are on the IRA army council are untrue. He wonders how often the party has to deny such claims.

When it is put to him that many people believe they are on the army council, he says: "It would be nice if everyone believed us. But at the end of the day people will make their own judgments and we will live with the consequences of that. How do you disprove an allegation of that kind? The only way would be if the army council invited you along to their next meeting. All you can do is ask the people who make these accusations to produce evidence to support them."

He says that naming people under parliamentary privilege has had "brutal and deadly consequences" in the past. He cites the murder in 1989 of John Davey, a Sinn Féin councillor from south Derry, named as an IRA activist by the DUP's Willie McCrea in the House of Commons. McAuley adds: "Let Peter Robinson repeat his allegations outside the privilege of the British parliament."

Officially, the gardaí will not be drawn on current levels of IRA activity. They say they cannot comment "for operational and security reasons". The gardaí have been monitoring activity at Dublin Port, amid suggestions that the IRA have been colluding with other criminals in robberies at the port and the hijacking of goods in transit.

Though people have not been caught in the act, according to Minister McDowell, the garda operation has yielded results; the authorities now know who is involved and the perpetrators have changed their ways.

The PSNI is officially far less reticent about IRA activity. Chief Constable Hugh Orde says the Provisionals have been "without doubt" responsible for approximately 50 punishment beatings and shootings - roughly the same number as carried out by the UDA in the past year. Most Republican beatings are the work of the Provos, rather than dissident groups, he adds.

Northern observers say the experience over the years is that punishment beatings can apparently be turned on and off, depending on the current political temperature. They claim the IRA is heavily involved in the highly lucrative trafficking of cigarettes and in protection rackets. However the evidence suggests that illegal drugs continue to be almost entirely the preserve of loyalist groups.

Richard McAuley is adamant that Sinn Féin does not condone any form of criminal activity. He trenchantly defends the party against the recent attacks by the Taoiseach and Mr McDowell. "They haven't produced a scrap of evidence to back up what they say. Every time you ask people to produce evidence, McDowell or anyone else, no one produces any."

He dismisses the claims as allegations and innuendo, geared towards the forthcoming elections, adding that it is impossible to say how they will affect his party's performance. He says any Republicans found breaking the law should face the full rigour of the justice system, exactly the same as everybody else.

"We have made that very clear, both publicly and privately. We have no truck at all with anyone who is involved in criminal activity. If there is evidence against them, they should be arrested and brought before the courts and we will be the first to condemn them."

He says the same holds for punishment shootings and beatings. "They shouldn't be happening - no ifs or buts or equivocation."

Unionists say Sinn Féin's insistence that they could not speak for the IRA was a fatal flaw throughout their interminable decommissioning negotiations. They believed some members of the Sinn Féin team were in the IRA. But nobody on the Unionist side dared to voice that belief openly. Even when the talking got down to its bluntest and most basic, it was a boundary which nobody dared to cross - from either side.

Gerry Adams's IRA denials have also failed to cut much ice among certain Republicans. Much has been made of the sardonic contribution by John Kelly, a founding member of the Provisional IRA. He was also a co-defendant with Charles Haughey in the Arms Trial.

In a letter to the Irish News, he pointedly referred to the fact that when he was convicted and sentenced for IRA membership, he did not deny the charge. Kelly said he was "bewildered, dismayed, disappointed and flabbergasted" by Gerry Adams's need to deny or disown the IRA.

He added dryly: "Ach sure, maybe if I go out and hug a few trees, smell a few roses and give my head a shake, I'll begin to catch myself on."

This was a reference to Gerry Adams's disclosure that he likes embracing trees and that he has done so in many places, including the gardens of 10 Downing Street and the White House. He likes the calming effect it has on him.

Willie Dillon

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=45&si=1145141&issue_id=10584

Adams is a Provo

(by Susan McKay, Sunday Tribune)

The late Eamon Collins claimed he got into trouble with Gerry Adams back in the early 1980's. The Newry IRA man had encouraged volunteers at an IRA funeral to continue to stomp their feet at the RUC, after one of Adams' circle asked them to stop. Adams told Collins the stomping "smacked of militarism and fascism". Collins retorted, "That's like something the Sticks would come out with."

Collins, in his book Killing Rage, said Adams looked shocked. "There was no greater insult that one Provo could level at another than to accuse him of following in the footsteps of the Official IRA…who had abandoned violence and embraced parliamentarism."

Afterwards, Collins said, he was upbraided by Danny Morrison and others. "Morrison told me Adams was not a stick, had never been a stick and would never be a stick. He explained at elaborate length Gerry Adams's republican bona fides. I had obviously touched a raw nerve."

Collins won't be touching any more raw nerves. He murdered in 1999. The Taoiseach, however, poked at a different one and came up with an apparently greater insult last weekend with his studiously casual comment that he had "always assumed Gerry Adams was in the IRA." Adams declared himself "flabbergasted". Was there was an "agenda" he demanded.

And of course, there was. Ahern has seen what happened to the SDLP after John Hume cajoled the hungry young crocodile into the parlour only to watch it grow fat and strong and start to eat the family. Fianna Fail isn't QUITE ready for the merger with Sinn Féin yet.

For now, PD minister for justice Michael McDowell's line prevails. The government and the DUP are agreed – Sinn Féin isn't fit to govern. "The DUP are straight talkers," said a government source, "Sinn Féin has to face it - they've got to lose the army."

Meanwhile, caught in an old lie, Adams is determined to lose his army history. He just wore that black beret back in the 1960's because it was the fashion. He was only joking when he wrote in 1976 in his An Phoblacht column, using his pseudonym of Brownie, "Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer…the course I take involves the use of physical force."

Back in war times, it was par for the course for IRA personnel to respond in the negative to the query, "Are you or have you ever been a member of the provisional IRA?" An admission would, after all, result in a jail sentence. There is no risk of that now, though one senior republican declined to comment on the Adams denial because, he said, "it is still an indictable offence."

Former IRA woman, Dolours Price, who bombed London in 1976, had no such qualms when, two years ago, she described Adams as having been her "commanding officer." Former Sinn Féin president, and now president of Republican Sinn Féin, Ruairi O'Bradaigh, laughed long and hard when asked was Adams ever a member of the IRA. "Well now, I don't want to be a felonsetter," he said. "But the record stands."

Adams' denial is nonsense. Equally so, Martin McGuinness's claim that he left the IRA soon after Bloody Sunday when hundreds of other young men and women were joining in justified outrage. HE could hardly say he was never involved since he'd been filmed strolling through bombed out Derry telling a BBC reporter he was second in command in the city. In his evidence to the Savile inquiry into Bloody Sunday he recorded this IRA role.

Asked by a reporter, late last year, WHY he left, McGuinness said it was for "personal reasons." About a decade ago, the BBC filmed Adams in West Belfast, praising the IRA to teenagers. Then a boy asked, "Were you ever in the IRA?" "No," Adams replied. "Why not?" asked the boy.

"It is such a ludicrous thing," said Ed Moloney, author of the acclaimed Secret History of the IRA. "It is so obvious to anyone who has followed Northern politics over the last 30 years and more that Adams is not only a member, he's a member of the leadership. The peace process couldn't have happened otherwise." It has always been precisely because of Adams' high standing in the IRA that the British have been interested in him.

The historians and journalists who are experts on Sinn Féin and the IRA – people like Moloney, Richard English, Brian Feeney and Tim Pat Coogan - agree that Adams had what English called an "impressive career" in the IRA. He joined in 1965, aged 16 and rose rapidly into its leadership. In 1972, the IRA called a ceasefire for talks on the precondition that he be released from internment to join the delegation meeting the then NI secretary, Willie Whitelaw. By 1977, Adams was on the ruling Army Council.

According to Moloney, Adams has a "Nelson Mandela complex". "He doesn't want to seem to have blood on his hands," he said. "Also, it helps in negotiations. It can't be disproved and he can keep up the fiction that he has to 'go to' the IRA."

There is some anger in republican circles about Adams' denial. "It is as if he is saying, 'I only hug trees - the rest of them blew up cities and slaughtered people," said Anthony McIntyre. Veteran republican, John Kelly, criticized Adams on similar grounds, and described Sinn Féin as a "dictatorship".

Martin Cunningham, ousted and replaced by Caitriona Ruane for the assembly elections, said some former IRA volunteers were angry that they were being pushed out by "these new peacetime republicans."

This isn't going to go away, you know. However, the Taioseach may rely on Teflon – Adams is coated with something stronger. His credibility may be dented, but he remains the unchallenged leader of the republican movement, and that is the Sinn Féin and the IRA of it.

March 13, 2003
http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/Sunday_Tribune/arts2004/mar7_Adams_provo__SMcKay.php

Sunday Independent
Adams, Ferris and McGuinness 'on IRA council'
Sunday March 14th 2004

JIM CUSACK and

ALAN MURRAY

EXCLUSIVE

INTELLIGENCE reports identify Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris as still being members of the Provisional IRA's ruling Army Council despite their claims to the contrary, the Sunday Independent has learned.

Security sources say the three are part of a seven-member leadership council that includes south Armagh farmer Thomas 'Slab' Murphy and a man in his 40s who lives near the Border, the veteran Belfast hardliner Brian Keenan and another Belfast man who was in charge of the IRA's bombing campaign in the city in the 1980s and 1990s.

All except Keenan publicly deny IRA membership. Adams said he was "flabbergasted" when the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, recently said he assumed the Sinn Fein President had been a member of the IRA. Martin Ferris, a Sinn Fein TD, said recently that he left the IRA after being released from prison in 1994. Ferris had served a 10-year sentence for arms smuggling.

Despite repeated exhortations by the Irish and British Governments for the IRA to disband, it has continued recruiting and training new members.

The IRA leadership has also directed that there will be no recognition of the North's police service as to do so would also give de facto recognition to the British Army's right to

SPANISH HORROR:

FIVE ARRESTED

be in Northern Ireland. Discussion on the subject of joining the Police Board in the North has been terminated at the orders of the ruling Army Council. Instead the IRA has effectively set up its own policing force which is responsible for the continued beatings and kneecappings in Catholic areas of the North.

The Sunday Independent has also learned that the recent stern criticism of the IRA and SF leadership by the Government has stemmed from Garda reports at the growing level of criminality for which the IRA is responsible.

In particular, the IRA's hijacking of container-loads of cigarettes at the Border and Dublin docks has caused serious problems for cross-Border trade. There is now a no-go area along a stretch of the main Belfast to Dublin road north of the Border for

INSIDE STORY:

THE IRA BOSSES

the movement of shipments of tobacco since the IRA hijacked a lorry containing €2.4m worth - including duty worth €1m - in December. The main cigarette manufacturer in the North, Gallahers, now ships cigarettes to the Republic by ferry to Liverpool and then into Dublin Port.

This blow to free trade across the Border is in clear defiance of the aims of the 'Strand II' element of the Good Friday Agreement which seeks to improve cross-Border relations and, particularly, trade. Sinn Fein is one of the parties signed up to this element of the Agreement.

Elsewhere, gardai continue to find evidence of the IRA's growing involvement in crime in Dublin and along the Border.

A hoax bomb found in the toilet of a public house in Pearse Street on Tuesday night is now believed to have been part of an IRA campaign in the city to extort money from businesses.

Meanwhile, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, who is in Washington for the annual St Patrick's Day political gathering, called on Sinn Fein and the IRA to end its close links with ETA and other foreign terroristgroups.

Mr Trimble said: "It's not absolutely clear yet who perpetrated these terrible deeds in Spain but ETA is still the prime suspect for it. I say to Mr Adams and Sinn Fein that they must end all links with ETA and terminate the party's globe-trotting around the world to fraternise with similar revolutionary elements."

Mr Trimble added: "They can't continue to play games like that and demand political credibility."

Yesterday it was also learned gardai are waiting to see results from forensic analysis of the bombs used in Madrid. The remote-control systems used in the bombs, involving adapted mobile phones, was perfected by the IRA's top bomb-maker in Dundalk in the early 1990s. It was passed on to Middle Eastern groups and to ETA. The same types of devices have been used in several bomb attacks in Iraq.

It is also known that the IRA gave instructions to ETA on how to manufacture timer power units (TPUs) - the mechanisms that prime and detonate bombs and mortars. TPUs and mortars identical to those used by the IRA were found in northern Spain in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell has stepped up his attack on Sinn Fein/IRA.

In a statement on Friday, Mr McDowell said he sought to distinguish between "genuine republicanism" and "bogus and fraudulent arrogation of the term 'republicanism' by people whose every act, deed and instinct demonstrate that they are in reality the very antithesis of republicans."

He said: "Let me say clearly that republicanism does not speak in muffled voice through a balaclava; Republicans don't break drug-addicts' legs with baseball bats; Republicans do not finance their political campaigns by organising major crimes: Republicans do not shoot car-thieves in their knees and ankles: Republicans could not plant bombs to kill civilians . . . And no true Republican could publicly lie and lie again about his involvement with all of those matters. No true Republican movement in modern Ireland would make common cause with the narco-terrorists of the Communist FARC in Colombia; or with the repressive Castro regime of Cuba; or with the murderous zealots of ETA."
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1145553

Irish Independent 29th February
Adams denies truth on IRA

Adams denies truth on IRA LAST week, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was stating the obvious when he pointed out that the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, was in the IRA, and when he said that Sinn Fein had a responsibility to curb IRA acts of thuggery; like the recent kidnapping in a Belfast bar of a dissident Republican who narrowly escaped with his life.

Why should the Sinn Fein leader take such great exception to some home truths being told by the Taoiseach, and why does he continue to deny what most others know, and accept, about his IRA past?

One event more than 30 years ago illustrates Mr Adams's role, his level of involvement and his importance in that terrorist organisation. And there is little to suggest that his influence, whatever his current role in the IRA, has lessened in the meantime.

In 1972, the IRA leadership met the British government in London for secret talks. One pre-condition the IRA had set, as the price of its participation, was that Mr Adams should be released from Long Kesh, so that he could join that IRA delegation. If you walk like a duck and swim like a duck, then you are a duck. But Mr Adams, still in denial, believes he is a swan. And such a mental condition is not easily treated.

The Sinn Fein leader's apparent capacity for self-delusion, his selective amnesia over past events, and his ability to lie with breathtaking moral equanimity about his IRA past are worrying, though perhaps not too surprising in the circumstances. After all the IRA is a secret, illegal, terrorist organisation where words take second place to physical force as a means of resolving political argument.

However the worry remains: if Mr Adams cannot be relied upon to tell the truth about his IRA past, how well can he be trusted on other matters?

Trust has become one of the casualties of this peace process. And restoring political trust will be difficult.

Nevertheless, one can appreciate some of the Sinn Fein leader's likely difficulties, given the nature of the republican movement, with its political and military wings. In crossing the bridge to democracy, Mr Adams has tried to impress two different audiences at the same time: republican hardliners, and constitutional politicians. As the reaction of the latter to last week's foiled IRA kidnapping showed, neither the Taoiseach nor the British prime minister are impressed any longer. Both feel they have been duped.

Mr Adams's ability to dissemble may have served some purpose at some time, in some quarter, perhaps at the outset of the peace process. But in 2004, Sinn Fein, after 10 years of deception, of broken promises, and of failing to implement the Good Friday Agreement in critical areas (decommissioning and policing), is finding such cynical tactics no longer work. They are counter-productive. They have only served to undermine the peace process, and now imperil that Agreement.

In Northern Ireland, six years after the historic accord, which was backed by a majority on this island, there is an armed peace. There are too many paramilitary guns, too little government, and with little prospect of decommissioning, there is no prospect of the restoration of devolution.

The IRA's failure to disarm has made government impossible to achieve, and weakened those parties (UUP and SDLP) and leaders most willing to work the accord. For this state of affairs Sinn Fein/IRA and Mr Adams must take the blame. The solution lies in their hands.

In the current review of the Good Friday Agreement, the most glaring deficiency in its operation has been the failure to achieve the IRA's disarmament and disbandment. Until that issue is addressed and resolved, Northern Ireland faces the prospect of a long period of direct rule.

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=44&si=1135542&issue_id=10511

Irish Independent 28th February
Two Sinn Fein TDs admit being in IRA

TWO Sinn Fein members of the Dail admitted yesterday they had been members of the IRA - but attacked the Taoiseach's speculation about their party leader.

As the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis opened in Dublin, former Republican prisoners Arthur Morgan and Martin Ferris confirmed their previous involvement but both said they had left the IRA after they were released.

A spokesman for Sinn Fein last night stated unequivocally that the party's other three TDs - Sean Crowe, Caoimhghin O'Caolain and Aengus O'Snodaigh - had never been IRA members.

Martin Ferris, TD for Kerry North, was jailed after being arrested when the gun-running trawler Marita Ann was held. He was released in 1994. Mr Morgan, TD for Louth, was also convicted of smuggling guns. He said he left the IRA in the "mid-Eighties."

Both TDs attacked the Taoiseach's remarks that he "assumed" Gerry Adams had been a member of the IRA.

A TV3 news poll last night indicated that a narrow majority - 52pc to 48pc - did not believe Mr Adams when he insisted he was not, and had never been, a member of the IRA.

Sinn Fein chairman of Derry Council's Marketing Committee, Cllr Barney O'Hagan, has been refused entry to the US because of a firearms conviction.

He was to have accompanied Mayor Shaun Gallagher and officials on a four-city tour to promote Derry as a destination for tourism and inward investment.

Senan Molony

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1135383&issue_id=10510

Sunday Times
March 07, 2004

John Hume: Adams was in the IRA
Liam Clarke

JOHN HUME has said he believes Gerry Adams was a member of the Provisional IRA and is puzzled by the Sinn Fein leader’s denial of paramilitary involvement.

The former leader of the SDLP, echoing a recent controversial remark by the taoiseach, said: “I always assumed he (Adams) was in the IRA and I am sure that everybody did. Maybe what (Adams) is saying is that he is not a member of it now. Of course, once a person denies something it is hard to stop.”

The accusation, from the architect of the peace process, further undermines the Sinn Fein leader’s insistence that he was not in the terrorist organisation. After Bertie Ahern’s allegation last month, Adams said: “I was not and I am not. He is wrong.”

Ahern and Hume’s belief in Adams’ past membership of the IRA is shared by the British government and borne out by the organisation itself. The IRA clearly identified Adams as a “senior officer of the Belfast Brigade” in a book it published in 1973.

The issue of Adams’s paramilitary past is to become a feature of the forthcoming local and European elections in the republic. Fianna Fail is determined to undermine Sinn Fein by pointing up its links to the IRA. Ahern’s party is closely competing with Sinn Fein for seats, especially on Dublin councils, and candidates are set to be briefed on the weaknesses of Sinn Fein rivals in their constituencies.

“Everyone in here believes it is about time that Fianna Fail launched a war of words on Sinn Fein,” said a senior party strategist overseeing the election campaign. “It is time the public was reminded of Sinn Fein, its past associations and present stance. We will not let them forget that there are still questions that need answering where the IRA is concerned.”

Evidence that Adams was in the IRA is contained in Freedom Struggle, the movement’s own account of its early history. It has an introduction written by P O’Neill, the pseudonym used by the Provisional IRA when it issues statements. Despite being banned in Northern Ireland and the republic, the book was reprinted at least twice and each time the confirmation of Adams’ IRA membership was retained.

In its account of the 1972 peace talks between the IRA and the British government in Chelsea, the book says that the terms for the talks were passed to the British government by Hume and Paddy Devlin, another senior SDLP member. The second of five conditions listed by the IRA read: “The immediate release of a senior officer of the Belfast Brigade from internment.”

Last night Hume confirmed that Adams was the only person released from internment as a condition of the talks.

Adams refers to this in his autobiography, Before the Dawn, in which he writes of his joy at being released and gives an account of the talks which followed.

Sean MacStiofain, the then IRA chief of staff, led the republican delegation. He later stated in an interview with a republican magazine, The Blanket, that all delegation members were in the Provisional IRA.

David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, has revealed that he told the Sinn Fein leader that admitting he had once been in the IRA would not affect his relations with unionists.

Trimble said: “A year or so ago I told Gerry Adams this constant re-iteration of things that everyone knows are not true, and that everyone knows he knows are not true, doesn’t do him any good in the eyes of unionists. He didn’t respond.”

Adams is believed by security forces, north and south, to have been chief of staff of the IRA on at least two occasions and to be a current member of the IRA’s ruling Army Council.

Adams’s continuous public denials of ever being in the IRA puzzle many. Last month he said he was “flabbergasted” that Ahern should think he had ever been an IRA member.

Additional reporting by Siobhan Maguire

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2765-1028783,00.html

Belfast Telegraph
Sinn Fein must learn that the truth is hard to beat

By Steven King
featureseditor@belfasttelegraph.co.uk

03 March 2004
PROVISIONAL IRA founder and former Assembly member John Kelly has probably done himself no favours this week - and not just on account of his criticisms of the Sinn Fein leadership as a "control dictatorship".

Photographed in his Maghera home for The Irish News, Kelly revealed himself to be a republican with catholic reading tastes.

Yes, visible was a copy of "Garvaghy: A Community Under Siege", required reading for all Irish agitproppers.

One suspects Peter Taylor's "Provos" is on most republican reading lists too, giving, as it does, its subject matter a certain dubious credence.

But what is the precious "base" to make of their elder statesman's taste for the liberal West German author Heinrich Boll? Or Henry Sinnerton's hagiography of David Ervine? Or Kevin Toolis's critical "Rebel Hearts"?

Most damning of all, in the single-track minds of Adams republicans, is that Kelly sports a copy of Maurice Goldring's "Belfast: From Loyalty to Rebellion", a very classy arch-Stickie text.

A little learning can be a dangerous thing in an organisation like the Provisionals. Certainly, the "unhealthy" spirit within Sinn Fein that Kelly speaks of was much in evidence at last weekend's ard fheis as speaker after speaker parroted the approved line.

Thus, all other politicians are "self-serving"; Sinn Fein demands are "basic rights"; and the security forces are "anti-democratic" - unlike the IRA, presumably.

The automatons who attend such gatherings are, certainly, possessed of voluminous certainty and fervour. Others might suggest they are simply possessed.

Either way, Sinn Fein has not yet peaked electorally. One, probably two, European seats are theirs for the taking this year, as are dozens of southern local authority seats.

In Northern Ireland, Westminster seats such as Newry and Armagh and Foyle look eminently winnable next year without some judicious tactical voting by unionists. And Sinn Fein ran very close in a number of Dail constituencies last time.

Unionists and many nationalists look upon the advance with incredulity. Maddeningly for them, the revulsion that used to surround Sinn Fein has dissipated among many ordinary voters, despite the enduring links with a still-active IRA.

Many is the respectable, peaceable parent whose offspring has come home to announce he or she has joined the university Sinn Fein cumann.

At the weekend, Sinn Fein speakers made much of the fact that they were gathered in RDS, not in a community hall in poverty-stricken Killinarden as was the case a decade ago.

I remember it well, demonstrating outside. It was another world, far more deprived than anywhere in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Fein has come a long way according to some measures. Yet, it is clear too that others' lack of acceptance still needles the party. Hence, Gerry Adams last week pronounced himself "exacerbated" by the rows over his IRA membership and the Tohill abduction.

But, as Nelson Mandela could tell the Sinn Fein leadership, their advance will always be limited while they engage in blatant lying.

Does it not occur to the Sinn Fein president that if he cannot be honest about his past - and some would say present - what hope is there of anyone taking his word at face value at any time in the future?

Besides, as John Kelly might point out, if the situation in nationalist West Belfast in the late Sixties and early Seventies was as desperate and hopeless as Sinn Fein would have everyone believe, why was he not a member of the IRA?

So long as Adams persists in this charade, what remote prospect is there of his bizarre vision of "an anti-sectarian dialogue designed to move us all... into a living, hopeful future in which they (unionists), as well as we, tell the British Government to butt-out" ever being realised?

The Sinn Fein president, no doubt views the attacks on him by the Taoiseach and by Justice Minster Michael McDowell as pre-election skirmishing, no more and no less.

But, until he comes to terms with how others see his party and its frequently warped thinking and behaviour, he will remain something of an outsider.

Sinn Fein has already made itself an indispensable part of the political scene in Northern Ireland by dint of its electoral pulling-power.

In a couple of years' time, though, it will have hit the glass ceiling imposed by the nature of its electoral support: too young, too male, too working-class.

In order to break through that ceiling, it will have to be more honest about its relationship with the IRA, about issues like the taxation levels required to fund their Utopian Ireland, and about the whole unity project itself.

Gerry Adams, famously a tree-hugger, said last week that after his recent personal setbacks he was "going to smell the roses".

Try the coffee, Gerry. Better still, borrow John Kelly's copy of Goldring's book and get your head around the real nature of your unionist opposition.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/opinion/story.jsp?story=497463

Irish Independent 2nd February
Taoiseach refers to book for evidence that Adams was IRA member

TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern yesterday re-ignited the controversy over his belief that Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams had been a member of the IRA.

The war of words between the two men has been going on for the past week and Mr Ahern added fuel to the row last night.

The Taoiseach said he was not basing his belief about Mr Adams and the IRA on security information but on "Mr Adams' own references" and "his own references indicate that he was a member".

Mr Ahern said that, over the weekend, he himself had gone back over his own "personal library" in order to jog his memory.

"And it did not take me too long to find the reference," said the Taoiseach.

He added: "The references are there. Maybe the best thing for me to do is just to give these. He can deny them if he wishes."

It was reliably learned afterwards that Mr Ahern's remarks relate to references in a book written by prominent TV journalist Peter Taylor in 1997.

The book said: "In his column the following week, Adams admitted IRA membership. It was the one and only time he has done so. He was recounting a conversation he had recently had with a visiting priest. Adams had defended the use of force, saying it was not a role the IRA chose or welcomed but one that had been forced upon it. 'I tried to explain it all like this,' he wrote.

"'Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer and, rightly or wrongly, I take a course of action as a means to bringing about a situation in which I believe the people of my country will prosper . . . The course I take involves the use of physical force but only if I achieve the situation where my people can genuinely prosper can my course of action be seen by me as to have been justified . . . I cannot complain if I am hurt, if I am killed or if I am imprisoned. I must consider these things as possible and probable eventualities . . . I have no one to blame but myself'."

Last week, Mr Adams responded to Mr Ahern's claims about his IRA membership by saying he was "flabbergasted". "He says he assumed I was a member of the IRA. I was not and I am not. He is wrong," said Mr Adams.

Gene McKenna
Political Editor

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=39&si=1136823&issue_id=10519