Gerry Rigged
Reid, Stuart
Gerry Rigged The Crocodile Tears of an IRA Apologist By Stuart Reid AaA year ago, Gerry Adams's com- IRA was responsible—but so does rades in the Irish Republican the IRA. That's the official...
...As president of Sinn Fein he cannot do that...
...The law did not discriminate...
...Sinn Fein-IRA is a national liberation front...
...Gerry Adams never apologizes, never explains...
...But our Gerry would have none of it...
...Army exploded a half-ton Adams does not condemn the IRA, bomb outside my office in London's Docklands and scared the bejesus out of me...
...In fact, the security forces have sometimes behaved abominably, but you would never guess from reading this book that the IRA had ever fired a shot, except in self-defense...
...The Adams family was certainly poor...
...there is routine torture of republican suspects...
...Yet it won't do to weep...
...At times he is so transparent as to make you turn away in watery-eyed embarrassment...
...He recounts how he and his friends once caught a frog...
...There is a harrowing chapter on Bobby Sands's hunger strike in Long Kesh in 1981...
...They can wait...
...But the Catholics were not as oppressed as Adams would have us believe...
...He writes of "our ma" and "our da" and grubby knees and freckled faces and first confessions ("I said 'frig,' Father...
...Adams's account of the Troubles is so one-sided as to be self-defeating...
...His answer: "It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it was necessary...
...The IRA, and Sinn Fein along with it, is fixated by death...
...The Ireland Adams wants— united, sovereign, socialist—will never come into being for the simplest of reasons: Nobody wants it...
...On another occasion he shot a rabbit and was almost reduced to tears by its screeching...
...They suffer no disadvantages where they are...
...Why, he took that frog from them right then and there and freed the little critter...
...It is true, as he says, that many thousands of poor Catholics throughout Northern Ireland had no vote in local elections, because they did not meet the property qualifications...
...Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA, which makes the IRA the armed wing of Sinn Fein...
...No honest man with wit enough to turn on a television set could be convinced by it...
...In a gripping but loathsome passage Adams describes what goes through an IRA sniper's mind when he shoots a British soldier...
...Sands, who was serving 14 years for bombing a factory, died by his own hand...
...Sands was a brave man, a man of principle...
...You would never guess that of the 3,210 people killed in terrorist incidents in Northern Ireland since 1969, 2,260 were civilians, and that most of them were killed by republicans...
...There are no human-rights abuses in Northern Ireland, except when the gunmen and kneecappers (republican and loyalist) go to work...
...My sadness turned to sorrow . . . Was tautology ever more barefaced, more shameless, more brazen...
...Young Gerry was one of ten children...
...They can live where they choose, and they choose to live in the north...
...They have subjected them to cruel and unusual punishments...
...The conflict is now purely sectarian, tribal...
...That is not to say that the book is wholly without merit...
...His suffering was freely chosen...
...As he waits for the Army patrol, the imaginary sniper—at least Adams insists that he is imaginary—asks himself whether it is right to kill...
...Father, I robbed an orchard, once...
...Bobby Sands did not die for Ireland...
...There was nothing to die for— except for the IRA...
...The border is open...
...They have murdered them...
...He lets you know that he loves dogs (not always a good sign) and folk music (always and everywhere a bad sign...
...That's the official line...
...but that was the case too with poor Protestants...
...It is impossible not to be moved by Sands's death, and Adams serves his friend well...
...In the case of the Docklands bomb he admits that the Gerry Adams Before the Dawn An Autobiography Morrow, 356 pp., $25 Stuart Reid is associate editor for comment of the London Sunday Telegraph...
...Over the centuries the Protestant English have robbed, beaten, and jailed the Catholic Irish...
...You get the drift: Gerry Adams is a man of peace...
...In Derry, for example, where the majority was (and is) Catholic, gerrymandering ensured that the town council was run by Protestants...
...The Brits—as he insists on calling the English—are the men of violence...
...They were guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of worship...
...And me and my friends tied thread to oul' Ma Doren's door and we played 'kick the door' all night . . Penance: one Our Father and three Hail Marys...
...But it is always tendentious, and often pernicious...
...To be sure, there is a desire for a united Ireland among the Catholics in the north, but it is not a burning desire...
...The British Army is the brutal and brutalizing arm of the imperial power...
...What little Adams has to say about the bomb in Before the Dawn speaks volumes...
...he was far from being the cowardly republican of English tabloid fantasy...
...the loyalist Protestants conduct "pogroms" against the nationalist Catholics...
...Until very recently the Catholics in Northern Ireland were denied full political rights...
...There are powerful passages in it, and grim humor, too...
...As newsflash followed newsflash," he writes, "as the television pictures of Canary Wharf were shown, and as word of the casualties, and later the two fatalities, emerged, my sadness turned to sorrow as I thought of those who had died and been injured, and for their families...
...he died, poor sod, for the Irish Republican Army...
...It is committed to ending British rule in Northern Ireland and to the creation of a single socialist state covering all of Ireland...
...One of his friends suggested that they should stick a straw up its arse and blow it up—the phrase makes you jump—like a football...
...At the time he died—for the supposed right of gunmen and bombers to be treated as political prisoners— Catholics in Northern Ireland enjoyed full civil rights...
...He knew what it was like to go without, and he makes the most of his disadvantages in Before the Dawn: The book's opening chapters are a cross between Stand By Me and those gritty English television dramas about working-class life in the industrial north...
...More to the point, they killed two young men—both, by cruel irony, Muslims—and signaled the end of an 18-month ceasefire...
...Understandably, that line caused much bitterness when the book was published in England last year, but the idea that political killing is sometimes necessary is common to all cultures and all causes...
...Adams's comrades are killers without a cause...
...You would never guess that three times as many Catholics have been killed by the IRA as by the Army and police...
...When Adams was born in West Belfast in 1948 they were still an oppressed minority...
...The nationalists have a case, at least historically...
...nor does he express outrage, or demand that the guilty men be brought to justice...
...The IRA's killings, however, are clearly unnecessary even by terrorism's own forgiving criteria...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 21
