“Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; /Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It’s hard to know how Gerry Adams feels this afternoon. On the one hand, there’s a fair chance he’s pleased that the Supreme Court has decided he was illegally interned in the 1970s and that he should not have been convicted for his two attempts to escape from Long Kesh. He is almost certain to receive a sizeable compensation for these injustices, and so too, in all probability, will those who attempted to escape with him. The reason his internment was deemed unlawful was because the minister who approved his detention wasn’t the secretary of state for Northern Ireland.
On the other hand, Gerry may be feeling a bit miffed that it has taken over forty years for the British to acknowledge the injustice.
Beyond this, and something which the reports of Adams’s case ignore, is the right and wrong of arresting and imprisoning people without using any of the normal channels of justice. The supreme court wasn’t saying that locking up Gerry and/or the dozens of young men interned with him was wrong in itself; they were saying it was wrong because the wrong politician signed off on it.
To talk of British justice, when the word of an individual is sufficient to have you seized by the police and imprisoned indefinitely, would be laughable if it wasn’t so draconian. The British invented concentration camps during the Boer War in South Africa; they have used their Special Powers in the north of Ireland to imprison whoever they thought needed imprisoning. But move along, move along – nothing to see here.
I can only hope Gerry and those imprisoned in similar circumstances get the heftiest possible monetary compensation. It won’t stop future injustices, but it’ll put the fear of God into those who think their arrogance won’t come back to bite them in the bum.
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