\n<\/p>\n
\u201cA<\/span> very happy St Patrick\u2019s Day,\u201d said Gerry Adams, as he took his seat in the stand at court 16 in the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday. Mr Justice Smith hadn\u2019t quite caught what the defendant said, and asked him to repeat himself.<\/p>\n \u201cOh that\u2019s very kind of you,\u201d the judge stammered when he finally worked it out. The green tie and small sprig of shamrock in Adams\u2019s lapel \u2013 worn alongside a Palestinian flag pin \u2013 ought perhaps to have been a clue.<\/p>\n Adams used to spend 17 March at the White House, glad-handing a succession of thematically dressed presidents and supportive senators of Irish extraction. This year, though, the former Sinn F\u00e9in president had a prior engagement in a British courtroom.<\/p>\n It was not a criminal dock, as some of those present in the public benches \u2013 who included the relatives of people murdered by the IRA during the Troubles \u2013 would certainly have preferred.<\/p>\n Adams is being sued in the civil high court in London by three surviving victims of IRA bombings, who want the judge to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the former president of Sinn F\u00e9in was also a former senior IRA leader and so could be held personally liable for their injuries.<\/p>\n Money may not be immediately at stake \u2013 the three claimants are seeking symbolic damages of \u00a31 \u2013 but for Adams, 77, the potential cost is still extremely high.<\/p>\n For more than five decades, in defiance of the flat assertions of multiple former allies, foes and journalists that he had a senior operational role in the IRA during what he described in court as \u201cthe war\u201d, Adams has insisted that he was never a member of the republican paramilitary group. Anyone who expected him to concede anything different once under oath was going to be disappointed.<\/p>\n Previous witnesses, including a former IRA bomber, former British army commander and former senior police and intelligence officers, have told the court that it is \u201cinconceiveable\u201d that Adams was not involved in authorising bombings, and that his previous denials \u201clack credibility\u201d. For the defendant, however, there would be no change to his insistence of more than half a century. \u201cI can\u2019t talk about my involvement in the IRA because I wasn\u2019t involved.\u201d<\/p>\n He would insist so again and again under cross-examination by Sir Max Hill KC on behalf of the claimants. Adams\u2019s witness statement to the court had asserted: \u201cI was never a member of the IRA or its Army Council. I was never the \u2018Commanding Officer\u2019 or \u2018OC\u2019 of the 2nd Battalion of the IRA\u2019s \u2018Belfast Brigade\u2019. Indeed, I have never held any rank or role within the IRA.\u201d<\/p>\n Was his statement really the truth? he was asked by Hill. \u201cIt is dead true,\u201d replied Adams.<\/p>\n When a 23-year-old Adams had attended secret ceasefire meetings with the British government in London in August 1972 alongside senior Republicans he was there as a member of the IRA, wasn\u2019t he? \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n Hadn\u2019t Se\u00e1n MacSt\u00edof\u00e1in, the acknowledged IRA chief of staff at the time, insisted several times that Adam had been there as an IRA member? \u201cHe is mistaken.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMr Adams,\u201d said Hill, \u201cyou are rewriting history. This was an IRA delegation of which you were one.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I don\u2019t accept that,\u201d said Adams.<\/p>\n The flat west Belfast voice that was once deemed too dangerous for British ears \u2013 requiring broadcasters to dub Adams\u2019s words using Irish actors until the ban collapsed in 1994 amid no little mockery \u2013 was low and frequently muffled, requiring the judge to ask him several times to speak up.<\/p>\n Adams has retired from professional politics both in Northern Ireland, where he was a (non-sitting) Westminster MP until 2011, and in Ireland, where he represented Louth in the D\u00e1il until 2020. The former firebrand has seemed in his later years to enjoy leaning into a more avuncular persona, hugging trees and maintaining a head-scratchingly whimsical Twitter feed that heavily featured his teddy bear, Ted.<\/p>\n He has never been convicted of any offence, and a Dublin jury last year awarded him \u20ac100,000 after finding that a BBC Northern Ireland documentary had libelled him by claiming that he sanctioned the murder of an IRA informant in 2006. (Bringing the case, Adams said after his win, had been about \u201cputting manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation\u201d.)<\/p>\n <\/span>Comedian Benny Hill in a sketch sometime around 1975. <\/span> Photograph: TV Times\/Future Publishing\/Getty Images<\/p>\n But those allegations that he was much closer to IRA violence than he admitted? They haven\u2019t gone away, you know. Again and again, in sometimes testy exchanges, Hill put it to Adams that the multiple assertions that he had also been involved in the armed struggle must be true.<\/p>\n Adams had attended meetings with fellow members of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA to plan the 1973 bombing of London, as asserted by the leading IRA man (and his former friend) Brendan Hughes? \u201cUntrue.\u201d<\/p>\n But he said he \u201cstood by\u201d the IRA? \u201cWell I stand by the African National Congress and you don\u2019t suggest I was a member of the ANC. I stand by the Palestinian people, you don\u2019t suggest I am a member of the PLO.\u201d<\/p>\n What about the photograph of Adams wearing a beret to carry the coffin at a 1971 Republican funeral, which a convicted IRA bomber, Shane O\u2019Doherty, has previously told the court was a clear sign of IRA membership? \u201cBenny Hill wore a beret,\u201d said Adams. \u201cIn very different circumstances,\u201d shot back the barrister.<\/p>\n While he hadn\u2019t been an IRA member, insisted Adams, he had defended many of the organisation\u2019s actions in the past, \u201cand I don\u2019t resile from that\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIf your neighbourhood was invaded and under occupation, some patriotic Englishmen would organise some form of resistance,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m glad the IRA have left the stage, I\u2019m glad they are not killing any more members of the British army, but I don\u2019t distance myself from the IRA.\u201d<\/p>\n The case continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cA very happy St Patrick\u2019s Day,\u201d said Gerry Adams, as he took his seat in the stand at court 16 in the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday. Mr Justice Smith hadn\u2019t quite caught what the defendant said, and asked him to repeat himself. \u201cOh that\u2019s very kind of you,\u201d the judge stammered when he<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[23860,23862,14806,23861,160,782,23714,949,3222,90],"class_list":{"0":"post-46979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-adamss","9":"tag-addley","10":"tag-benny","11":"tag-beret","12":"tag-court","13":"tag-esther","14":"tag-gerry","15":"tag-high","16":"tag-hill","17":"tag-moment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}