A river of crocodile tears over the Gerry Adams affair

It has been a busy year in Irish politics – and hectic to say the least: first the never-ending revelations into Catholic sex abuse finally implicated the state, then the public was treated to the ‘budget from hell’, after which the finance minister was diagnosed with cancer – and the media assaulted for reporting it. But the most significant events have been those surrounding the leadership of Sinn Féin: the always uneasy world of post-conflict Northern Irish politics has been thrown into a tailspin after allegations that Gerry Adams, the president of the Sinn Féin and de facto leader of Irish republicanism failed to act sufficiently when his niece accused her father Liam, Adams’s brother, of repeatedly raping her from the age of four onwards.

It’s just the kind of thing that could end the career of a man who, reviled as a terrorist and then lauded as a peacemaker, was once thought of as a potential future president of Ireland.

The allegations surfaced in mid-December when Liam Adams’s daughter, Áine Tyrell, appeared on a television programme and waived her right to anonymity. Gerry Adams announced that his brother should hand himself in and, a few days later, Liam Adams made his whereabouts known to Irish police who were unable arrest him as they did not have a European arrest warrant.

A warrant is now being prepared – slowly – by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) on the charges that have been made against him and will be presented to their counterparts in the Republic of Ireland.

The allegations have caused severe difficulties for both Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and the statutory services in the North of Ireland. The recriminations are flying as it becomes increasingly apparent that both the British-run state authorities and Irish republicans, who operated a virtual para-state in West Belfast at the time, have been aware of the allegations for 22 years. The IRA has shot dead and driven-out alleged child abusers in the past.

The claims of rape and incest go back as far as 1978 and Tyrell also says her father physically abused his wife in order to get her to run out of the house so he could indulge in sexual abuse. For her part, Tyrell initially claimed Gerry Adams has supported her but this story appears to be coming apart.

Tyrell claimed that Gerry Adams had known about the alleged sex attacks since 1987 when she, then aged 14, told him. She also stated that she and her mother made an official complaint to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the predecessor to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Tyrell’s complaint against her father appears not to have been investigated, leading to suspicions in the paranoid and spy-infested world of Northern politics that either the RUC or British Army either attempted to manipulate Tyrell or used the information to turn Liam Adams into an informer.

Despite the allegations being made against him, Liam Adams went on to work for at least three youth groups in both the North and the Republic of Ireland. Ironically, Liam Adams himself was not adverse to whipping-up paedophile hysteria. In 1998 Liam Adams made the unlikely claim to the Irish Independent newspaper that there was a “very well-organised” cross-border child sex abuse network. “We have names of well-known business people who we are 100pc sure are involved,” he is quoted as saying. (1) Ireland is currently undergoing one of the longest-running sexual abuse panics ever witnessed and Liam Adams’s 1998 claims were clearly an attempt to make political capital of this fact.

The story gets stranger and stranger, though. Gerry Adams claimed in a follow-up interview with RTÉ television in the Republic of Ireland that he was estranged from his brother, had confronted him as soon as he was told and had reported the allegations privately to the youth groups in question. The groups have stated they have no record of this.

The known details of Liam Adams’s life appear to contradict Gerry Adams’s claim that he was estranged from his brother. The estrangement is said to have lasted from 1987 until around 2002 or 2003 but Gerry Adams was photographed at his brother’s second wedding which apparently occurred after the 1987 revelation. Additionally, Liam Adams sought the Sinn Féin nomination to stand in the general election in 1997 and is said to have traded heavily on his family name. The contradicts Gerry Adams, who stated on Irish television that he had his brother ejected from Sinn Féin as soon as he became aware of his involvement. Adams, in his three volumes of autobiography, mentions his brother several times, always in positive terms.

In the same television interview Adams, who comes from a family of thirteen children, dropped a bombshell when he went on to claim that his father, Gerry Adams Snr, had sexually and physically abused some of his children, but that he, Gerry Adams Jr, had never been abused. Gerry Adams Snr was a well-known republican and was buried with full IRA honours.

Political fallout

Gerry Adams is famous around the world for his transformation from man of war to warrior for peace. By signing the Belfast Agreement and bringing the IRA first to ceasefire, then disarmament and finally disbandment, he has been hailed as one of the world’s great peacemakers but his standing accused of failing to protect children from a sexual predator is only the latest debacle that has dogged Adams in recent years including the murder of Robert McCartney and the Northern Bank robbery, both of which have been blamed on the IRA.

There is no way for Adams to escape the consequences of these latest revelations – despite continued support in his political heartland of West Belfast, there are rumblings of discontent in wider republican circles, including South Armagh and in the Republic of Ireland. What he can do, though, is attempt to ameliorate the damage done to his reputation. This process has already started.

Paddy Hoey, a journalism lecturer who is studying for a PhD in press representation of Irish republicanism at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, argues that ultimately Adams will resign.

“Adams has nowhere else to go – there only was one option, a tilt at the presidency of Ireland,” he said. “He’s 61 with a good career in writing books. What cultural or political cachet does Adams have for Sinn Féin now? And philosophically he’s not driving them either, he’s always been an opportunist,” says Hoey. “It proves his control-freakery extends right into every aspect of Sinn Féin.”

According to Hoey, Adams’s fate may now be sealed but had he stood down earlier he would now be viewed as an elder statesman. Others disagree, saying Adams will live to fight another day but the saga will damage his party.

Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA member turned staunch critic of Sinn Féin, says Gerry Adams’s behavior is unacceptable but it won’t threaten his position as leader: “He’s behaved worse than the bishops implicated in covering-up sex abuse in the Catholic church [but] the [party] grassroots are so servile and bovine that they will see him as the victim,” he says. “He has already shifted the focus of victimhood from Áine to his wider family.

“It’s not an issue about the peace process, it’s a pure matter of not protecting children – I don’t look at this through republican eyes, you have to look at this as an individual.”

McIntyre does recognise the debacle is having serious political consequences: “It won’t help Sinn Féin electorally in the South [the Republic of Ireland] but they can’t get rid of him. The party will not expand [any further] in the South – they’ll be seen as wrapped up in their own lies.”

He is right that Sinn Féin is now likely to wither on the vine in the Republic of Ireland – but his contention that the Liam Adams affair is all about victimhood is much more significant in an Ireland gearing-up for a full-blown moral panic.

Spooks and tears

Whatever the truth about the role of the security forces (and, frankly, would anyone be surprised to hear that the republican movement was stuffed with informers and agents?) one thing is for sure: the role of the victim has been cemented in Northern Irish politics.

The conflict in Ireland ran, more or less, from 1966 to 1994 and in that time created more than its fair share of actual victims: people who were killed or injured as a result of the fighting. But that’s not what it means to be a victim in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Today, victimhood is less a simple statement of the fact of being injured in some way than it is a means of staking out a claim, whether to financial reparations, increased political representation, demonstrative but phoney apologies or simply an audience for one’s tale of woe. Playing the role of victim affords the complainant instant credibility and an unassailable position on the moral high ground: ‘I hurt therefore I am’. Whatever the truth of Gerry Adams’s allegations against his late father, the timing of the revelation is a transparent attempt by Adams to assume the mantle of victimhood for himself (in addition to implying that, if the allegations against Liam Adams prove to be true, they are part of a wider, psychological ‘cycle of violence’).

Áine Tyrell’s allegations against her father were never going to be a simple matter for the courts – the fact that Gerry Adams is her uncle made their politicisation an inevitability. This does not mean, however, that Gerry Adams was compelled to transform himself into something like a guest on the Jerry Springer show by blurting out previously unknown allegations about his own father. Áine Tyrell is presumably seeking justice and feels that speaking-out is now the only option left open to her. But what is Gerry Adams seeking? With his father dead there will be no serious attempt to investigate the claims, nor is there anyone around to refute them.

The perverse logic of victimhood is absolutely central to the endless Irish peace process: in order for the process to work no one side is allowed to claim victory but everyone is encouraged to bleat about how hard done by they are. This is sometimes mistaken as a simple demand for money by ex-combatants but while this is a factor it is far from the driving force.

True, there are legions of community groups, small scale regeneration projects, art initiatives and deeply dubious ‘victims’ groups’ stuffed to the gills with the most unlikely of figures. Rather than simply being make-work schemes or pay-offs of ‘shut-up money’ for erstwhile gunmen, however, these groups are an authentic reflection of the ‘New Northern Ireland’, an illegitimate statelet of mind borne out of the tears of hard men who traded-in their armalites for the jargon of therapy – and one that bores the rest of us to tears, incapable as it is of actually bringing a political settlement to a question that has bedeviled Ireland since 1920.

Today, Northern Irish politics most closely resembles a twelve thousand-step group therapy session where the only question discussed is whose suffering should be remembered as more significant than that of others. The logic is perfectly simple: ‘respect’ must be afforded to all, regardless of their prior role or the nature of their demands – apparently we’re all victims now. By casting the conflict in this light the British and Irish authorities, with more than a little help from both republicans and unionists alike, have managed to contain the violence but have no way of permanently concluding things.

The sad fact is that most political conflicts are zero sum games whether we like it or not – they all have winners and losers. By contrast, The Irish peace process, by doing away with the possibility of anyone winning, has made losers of everyone involved – and bad losers, at that.

Gerry Adams has himself already been psychologised, indeed pathologised, by at least one journalist. Malachi O’Doherty wrote: “The story that unfolds now is of a Gerry Adams who, through all the protracted negotiations to resolve the peace process in the past decade, had other burdens to carry, the revelation that his father had been a paedophile and the suggestion that a pattern of abuse had extended into his own generation.”

There have been even more explicit suggestions that Adams, and by inference the entire IRA campaign, was driven not by the political desire to drive the British state out of Ireland but the fragile ego of a hurting Adams. This offence to common sense deserves to be dismissed out of hand but, unfortunately, it fits with the new official narrative of the conflict: a simplistic morality tale in which bad men did bad things for unfathomable reasons.

Crying for all it’s worth – and it is worth all too much in Ireland – is not the sole preserve of republicans. The stiff upper lip is noticeable by its absence on the other side of peace lines as unionists match every move made by republicans, desperate to claim the status of damaged but heroic failures for themselves.

The ardent anti-republican MP and assembly member Iris Robinson, wife of Northern Irish first minister Peter Robinsion, announced over Christmas that she was retiring from politics due to mental health problems. Once the laughter had subsided about mental illness being a pre-requisite for membership of the DUP (Robinson once claimed she knew a psychologist who could cure the ‘mental illness’ of homosexuality) she was afforded the traditional ‘respect’ and empty ‘concern’ doled-out to the ‘afflicted’ by Irish politics.

Since then, Robinson has been outed as having been unfaithful to her husband and attempted to kill herself. She has also been caught-up in an alleged financial scandal involving her lover and two property developers and this may yet unseat Northern Ireland’s first minister. Whatever the truth, Peter Robinson is desperately attempting to play the victim and many feel he is doing so in order to deflect attention from the financial matter.

Even the DUP’s rivals, Traditional Unionist Voice, who are usually cast in the role of hardline ultra-unionist bad boys, are steeped in the language and imagery of Irish victimology, constantly whining about how traditional ‘British values’ have been sold-out by the DUP’s deals with the republican devil.

This latest episode is no different: Sinn Féin’s critics will use it to batter the party as ‘para-abusers’ and Sinn Féin will complain it is being victimised.

What is really perverted in Ireland is politics, which has been reduced from a series of ideological demands to a rag-bag of inchoate complaints and an arms race of tears – a mutually assured remonstration that valourises the primeval authenticity of emotional pain over thought-out political positions.

Never mind the therapy, it’s about time Irish politicians – of whatever stripe – learned to shut up about their troubled souls and instead started to articulate the demands of their constituents.

(1) Exposed: Ireland’s vile child-sex rings, Irish Independent, July 11, 1998