Liam Adams, brother of Sinn Fein’s Gerry, is wanted by the police in the north of Ireland to answer allegations of sexual abuse against his daughter. As a punctilious Republican he presented himself to Gardai in Sligo so that proper Irish police will serve the extradition warrant on him despite the fact that he could have been on the other side of the border in an hour.
Only his abused daughter is emerging from this episode with any dignity. Liam has been on the run for a year and the Irish papers are full of contradictory accounts by Gerry about how he had tried to alert youth organisations his brother had been working with about his abuse. The youth organisations say Gerry did no such thing. Papers like the Irish Times choose to focus on his reluctance to persuade victims to go to the police and Gerry has been tying himself in knots to retrospectively say that he would not have had a problem with it.
What was odd this week was watching Gerry Adams talking on TV about the revelations that his own father was a child abuser. It was an Oprah Winfrey solution to a political problem which must have been personally difficult for him and his family but was also politically very manipulative.
The thing that hits you smack in the face is the similarity between how the Republican Movement and the Catholic Church have dealt with their squalid secret. The pogroms that gave birth to the state in the north of Ireland destroyed militant Republicanism as a political force in Belfast. Its flame was kept alive by a few dozen families from the twenties through to the late sixties. Gerry senior was one of the faithful and was shot and wounded by the police in 1942 while on a reprisal operation for the execution of IRA volunteer Tom Williams. So it seemed only right that he be buried with full Republican honours. Gerry junior says that he was ambivalent about this since by the time of his father’s death he had learned about his long history of sexual abuse inside the family. Not having the flag on the coffin would have set tongues wagging and the priority was to protect the Republican Movement’s reputation.
Equally Gerry claims that he tried to block his brother being proposed as an election candidate and said on Irish television that he made an unsuccessful attempt to get him expelled from Sinn Fein. This defies belief. Under his leadership the organisation junked its historic programme and sits in government with one of the most right wing parties in Europe. If Gerry had wanted Liam chucked out he could have got his way, unless of course the leadership thought it was better to bury the scandal.
Scandal is not the only thing that the Republican Movement has buried. In the seventies, eighties and up to the mid nineties it ran a parallel justice system in its heartlands which commanded a fair degree of support. For example my aunt was having some trouble with kids making a nuisance of themselves in her garden. She went to see Sinn Fein who said they’d ask someone to talk to them. Whatever was said did the trick without ASBOs or police involvement. What the Provies termed “anti-social behaviour” was dealt with by a system of verbal warnings, beatings, exile, punishment shooting and the occasional execution for real recidivists. While teenage car thieves, burglars and drug dealers knew that they ran the risk of getting kneecapped or bludgeoned with baseball bats Republicanism’s royal family allowed two of its senior members to abuse their children for years. The leadership’s movement covered this up and using the medium of celebrity revelation does not make that political problem go away.
Liam redux 
Leave a comment