Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

BBC 1 Northern Ireland screened Below the Radar’s Peter Robinson biopic last night.  Like the company’s programme about Gerry Adams , this was more hagiography than documentary.   Robinson and Adams , two hugely controversial figures, portrayed as visionary statesmen. Beyond the moral and factual arguments, this style of broadcasting raises a fundamental issue around the role of an independent media.  Surely its purpose is not to show political figures exactly as they wish to be shown?  That’s a job for PR consultants or party press offices. I wonder whether the sagas around Robinson and Adams, over the past year, tell us as much about journalism in Northern Ireland than they do about the men themselves. Twelve months ago the BBC in particular had sunk its teeth deep into Irisgate and the First Minister‘s financial affairs.  It looked like Peter Robinson’s political career was at an end. Those events were eclipsed by a vastly overblown policing and j...

"Wellity, wellity, wellity" as Homer Simpson once observed.  We've finally seen it all.  Not quite Lord Gerry of Andersonstown,  but certainly Baron of the Manor of Northstead.  In reply to a question from Nigel Dodds, the prime minister confirmed: "I'm not sure that Gerry Adams will be delighted to be Baron of the Manor of Northstead. But nonetheless I'm pleased that tradition has been maintained." Let's hope the interviewers in southern Ireland are appraised of the Sinn Féin president's new title.  He ought to be addressed properly during the election campaign.

Early this year the Guardian provided blanket coverage of Sinn Fein’s ‘Irish Unity’ conference in London.   A questionable editorial choice , given that the talking shop was considered irrelevant by just about every other British newspaper. Usually its pages are light on comment from Northern Ireland, but the paper’s one regular contributor of Ulster opinion is a certain Gerry Adams.  Whatever patronising, tacked together, imbecilic garbage occurs to the Sinn Féin president, can’t be rushed to the Guardian’s presses quickly enough. His latest sortie draws ridiculous parallels between Afghanistan and the Northern Irish Troubles.  And I only wish that Kevin Myers response had also been carried by a national British paper.  It appeared in the Irish Independent and you can also read the full article in today’s Belfast Telegraph.  Here I reproduce my edited highlights. I'll take criticisms of NATO/US/British policies in Afghanistan from anyone -- Amnesty Inter...

In today's Belfast Telegraph I use Gerry Adams' latest US Tour as a jumping off point to examine Sinn Féin's lack of focus on the people who will actually decide the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. The annual St Patrick's Day exodus to the United States is not what it used to be. During the 1990s, Northern Ireland would gratefully empty its entire cohort of politicians, clutching suitcases full of green clover and emerald ties, unto a fleet of Boeing 747s bound for Washington. Stormont's most ardent pedlar of Irish kitsch then is still, all these years later, its greatest enthusiast for a transatlantic jolly. Gerry Adams arrived in Boston on Saturday, scheduled for a full week of paddywhackery, focussed on promoting the goal of ‘Irish unity' among the island's diaspora. He really needn't bother. The Sinn Fein president is already treated like a superstar by the section of Irish America he prefers to court. Adams’s breakfast date on Sunday mor...

Developing yesterday's post, and focussing solely on Gerry Adams, I write about a moral vacuum , in today's Belfast Telegraph. The decision to schedule the documentary on Sunday proved unerring. This week the Old Bailey bomber, Dolours Price, is scheduled to present vital information to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims Remains (ICLVR). She alleges that Adams was the officer commanding the Provisional IRA in Belfast, directly responsible for setting up two secret cells, 'the Unknowns', tasked with 'disappearing' suspected informers. These allegations implicate Adams in the killing of Jean McConville, who was abducted, shot and buried on a beach in Co Louth, during the 1970s. The murder is a notorious example of IRA brutality and fanaticism. During The Bible, Adams talked about forgiveness and said that, after three decades of 'war', "all of us have plenty to forgive and be forgiven for". Perhaps. But anyone with a shred of...

Yesterday evening the BBC aired the most entertaining Winter Olympic event to date. Ski cross features four downhill skiers, hurtling down a snowboard track, together. They hurdle jumps, perform hair-raising manoeuvres in order to overtake opponents and the inevitable tangled skis cause all manner of spectacular crashes. It was the second most compelling sport on TV last night, the first being Gerry Adams’ moral contortionism on Channel 4 . The Sinn Féin President’s meditations on ‘the Jesus story’ were predictably noxious. Predicated on a monstrous blend of moral relativism and abstraction, Adams’ gospel of the Troubles implies that the killers were no more culpable than the victims. And at the bottom of all our problems, original sin, exclusive to the English, to ‘the Brits‘, absolving Gerry and his comrades of any responsibility. “Stupid operation” rather than barbarous mass murder, “political activist” rather than terror chief. Adams’ Orwellian lexicon is littered with euphe...

Is anyone else profoundly, stultifyingly, mind-numbingly bored by the saga unfolding at Hillsborough? From its outset I’ve been cynical about the process. Talks conducted between the DUP and Sinn Féin, Siamese twins bound together by common dependence on dysfunctional carve-up at Stormont, were never likely to deliver a genuine fresh start for power-sharing. But over the course of the past week cynicism had been replaced by tedium. We have had news of countless ’breakthroughs’, several impending and significant arrivals by prime ministers and even a US foreign secretary, a welter of leaking and spinning which has amounted to nothing. Meanwhile, at Stormont, Assembly business has effectively ground to a halt. The UUP and SDLP have participated, waiting to be included in the process at Hillsborough, but the DUP and Sinn Féin have been working with skeleton teams. Indeed Jeffrey Donaldson, Nigel Dodds and other figures have been consigned to the business of every day politics, seemin...

Eoghan Harris is a commentator accustomed to transgressing republican shibboleths. In his latest Sunday Independent piece he ponders Gerry Adams’ response to a family history disfigured by involvement in campaigns of terrorist violence, as well as paedophilia. Although Harris takes a circuitous, and rather more interesting route, he reaches a conclusion which echoes my own reflections on the Sinn Féin president’s skewed sense of morality. It is ‘time (Adams) took the final step and admitted that the armed struggle “besmirched” the tricolour as much as the abuse’. Gerry Adams might command sympathy by describing shame at the abusive actions of his father. He might, Harris hints, even seek to exploit a national mood of sympathy, as the Republic of Ireland as a society grapples with its own issues around clerical and institutional abuse. But if we are generous, and allow that Adams’ motivations may not be exclusively tactical and manipulative, still, we can hardly applaud his cando...

Gerry Adams’ influence within Republicanism might be on the wane, but he has lost none of his capacity to astound and revolt. First we had Adams’ interview on Christ and forgiveness. Now another clear example of the Sinn Féin president’s warped morality has emerged. Speaking about ‘Republican honours’ accorded to his father, who had repeatedly abused children within his own family, Adams’ observed, “I didn’t want him buried with the tricolour, I think he besmirched it.” It is impossible to read this statement without reflecting on a succession of IRA funerals which Adams was happy to attend. Thomas Begley, who killed himself in the process of murdering nine Saturday afternoon shoppers on the Shankill Road, clearly did not ‘besmirch’ the tricolour, in Adams’ estimation. He was happy to act as Begley’s pall bearer. Gerry feels that emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children brings shame on the Republic of Ireland flag whilst murder, maiming, torture and all manner of other c...

Gerry Adams, or 'this blog' as he now prefers to call himself, would no doubt be keen to assure voters that they are not witnessing the fag end of his political career. After all, he recently assured the media that he will remain Sinn Féin's president as long as he damn well pleases (or words to that effect). Democracy, eh? Still, there's no harm in having more than one string to your bow. Gerry is already a confirmed man of letters (albeit one who attracts widespread academic derision) and 'a blog'. Now he's turning his attention to the tourist industry , offering guided tours of South Armagh. I'm sure 'Cú Chulainn Tours', staffed by ex republican terrorists, offers a highly impartial account of the area's history!

From teargas , sorry ‘léargas’, the virtual tree from which the wise old owl of Sinn Féin dispenses pellets of ‘insight’, “This blog travels to Wales on Tuesday – to Swansea – to speak to the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly. I will tell that forum that while Irish republicans want our rights, we do not seek to deny the rights of anyone else. We want justice for all and privilege for none.” A paragraph which teaches us, not only that the Provos’ president is scheduled to address BIPA’s latest plenary session this morning, but that Gerry Adams has taken to describing himself, in the third person, as a ‘blog’. ‘The blog’ has, in recent months, been on a veritable world tour promoting ‘Irish unity’. Slugger O’Toole has a preview of what he (it?) will say on the latest leg, other than, presumably, “HELLO SWANSEA!”. Two passages in particular jump out from amongst the leaden, Orwellian Shinnerspeak which ‘the blog’ intends to deliver. In deference to the ‘east-west’ sensibili...

Regular commenter Gary has kindly sent me a link to John-Paul McCarthy’s article , in the Irish Independent, which offers a savage assessment of Gerry Adams ‘unity’ rhetoric. “It isn't so much the repetition of these inanities that is so profoundly depressing, so much as the deep intellectual and emotional vacuity that lies at the heart of the non-analysis here.” McCarthy unpicks the latest buzzwords to discover an ideology which has changed little since 1920. It is worth reading the piece in its entirety, if only to enjoy its author’s Sopranos inspired flourish. But perhaps its most telling passage examines the tangential role which Adams’ fantasies accord the pro-Union majority. “The article once again emphasises "British policy" as the "key to unlocking the potential for this change to occur", and his references to Britain's "colonial past" are simply a coded way of denying the democratic basis of the unionist desire to go their own way in 19...

Gerry Adams is not, by anyone’s estimation, a parvenu in the world of Northern Ireland politics. Yet, with all his accumulated years of experience, the Sinn Féin leader talks about unionism as if he had no understanding of the thinking which animates it. Scratch the rhetoric and you’ll find, unalloyed, unqualified, lacking even a veneer of nuance, the old republican assumption that unionists are possessed by some manner of false consciousness. Adams does hint that he is prepared to humour the misapprehension (as he sees it) of 20% of Ireland’s population that it is British, however, at no level has he internalised the lessons of the many years of needless violence in which he participated. Britain’s ‘political presence’ on this island is an extension of the British political identity of a majority of Northern Ireland’s inhabitants. It is almost poignant that a lifetime in politics can leave someone so untouched by any understanding of that which he professes to oppose. The Provisi...

One might suppose that, having purportedly accepted the principle of consent, Sinn Féin had better spend its time convincing people in Northern Ireland of the merits of Irish unity. But with the Republic's economy more closely resembling a bedraggled tabby than a sleek, formidable tiger and the imminent prospect of a British government which actively encourages Northern Ireland's continued participation in the Union, Gerry Adams is reduced to convening a conference of Irish Americans, in order to pursue his mythical 32 County Celtic utopia. The gathering included luminaries such as Brian Keenan. Not the deceased IRA man, addressing delegates by video link from hell, but rather the pretentious poet-hostage whom discerning Lebanese literature fans confined to a small cell for four years in a vain attempt to protect the reading public from his offences. Unfortunately Islamic Jihad's public-spiritedness did not last forever and their former detainee acquired an audience for...

It is difficult to know what to say about the horrible events which took place in Antrim on Saturday night. It is a struggle even to turn one’s thoughts this morning to Northern Ireland and its politics. The only words which are not freighted with futility are words of sorrow and sympathy for the men who were shot so mercilessly, and their families. Sad, indeed tragic events, unfold in our newspapers, on our television screens and occasionally in front of our very eyes, daily. To an extent we become inured or else we seek comfort in the mutuality of our revulsion. The nature of this weekend’s horror was somehow particularly difficult to stomach, accompanied as it was with the unedifying, hollow charade which masqueraded as condemnation from Sinn Féin. For fourteen hours the party remained silent. Its reaction, when it came, was laced with equivocation and qualification, heavy with the implication that republicans remain the troubles’ real victims. ‘Counterproductive’, ‘an atta...

Alex Kane on Gerry Adams, Republicanism championed by Mr Adams is a brutal, half-baked, blinkered, myth-ridden, intellectually redundant and economically fatuous ideology. His speech in Limerick was the sort of hand-me-down, crypto-revolutionary junk you would expect to hear in a shebeen after one too many glasses of poteen. It was the speech of an old man in a great hurry: the speech of a man who had finally realised that his political ambitions would remain unfulfilled. Ironically, it is a speech that unionists, if they had any sense, could learn from; for it demonstrated that there is practically nothing left in all-Ireland republicanism other than hot air and wish fulfilment. Mr Adams will continue to travel the world, addressing diminishing audiences of the curious and the still delusional. Yet, wherever he rests his head at night, Gerry Adams knows one thing for certain: his day isn’t coming.

Talk about overreach! Gerry Adams has called for an emergency debate on Gaza ……. in the Northern Ireland Assembly. The speaker has dismissed the idea that such a debate is necessary on the grounds that events in Gaza do not comprise a local issue. It might be supposed by anyone with even the flimsiest grasp of reality that he shouldn't have needed to waste breath pointing that out. That analysis, however, does not account for Gerry.

I give you the second of Gerry Adams' blog pieces. It is awe-inspiringly incoherent. Had the bearded wonder taken some manner of dodgy mushroom before, gibbering incoherently, dare I say it, shivering in a blanket, he pecked out this chef-d'oeuvre of republican blogging? Perhaps he simply forgot to take his medication?

Reviewing the previous 12 months in politics in Northern Ireland, Mark Devenport observes that 2008 witnessed the DUP sidelining its long-standing leader, Ian Paisley, and the personality cult which attended his leadership. Perhaps 2009 will be the year that the DUP’s partner in sectarian carve-up, Sinn Féin, relegates its own aging demagogue, Gerry Adams, to the hinterland of enforced semi-retirement. The provos’ president was reduced to a series of intemperate ethno-nationalist diatribes over the course of 2008. In a bizarre role reversal Martin McGuinness was deployed as good cop to Adams’ bad. Increasingly, the West Belfast MP’s influence, even as a figurehead, might hinder Sinn Féin. His rhetoric is likely to prove counterproductive as republicans become ever more institutionalised at Stormont. Additionally, and significantly, his patronage of executive liability, Caitriona Ruane, will become an impediment to removing the party’s most embarrassing minister. Adams hard-line...

The Republic’s President, Mary McAleese, visited an Orange hall in Cavan yesterday and in the course of her engagement made the following remark, “It is possible to be both Irish and British, possible to be both Orange and Irish. We face into a landscape of new possibilities and understandings.” It did not take long for a Republican Sinn Féin spokesman to reject her contention , “It is not possible for someone to give their allegiance both to Ireland and to Britain. Britain represents the denial of Ireland’s rights. Orangemen should instead be encouraged to recognise that they are exclusively Irish, and to work for the benefit of the Irish Nation rather than adhering to narrow sectarian Orange ideology. To suggest that Unionists are anything other than Irish amounts to a tacit acceptance of Thatcherite claims that the Six Occupied Counties are ‘as British as Finchley’.” The statement represents a classic slice of immoderate nationalism, issuing from a dissident fringe of republicanis...