Was Gerry Adams in the IRA?

It’s weird the way sometimes things line up together. Yesterday I watched a 2013 Youtube interview of Miriam O’Callaghan with Gerry Adams, in which she kept asking him if he had been in the IRA; then this morning in the Irish Times I read an article by Pat Leahy who plays the same tired old tune – was Gerry in the IRA.

Both Miriam and Pat seem certain Gerry was in the IRA. “Adams’s role as an IRA commander has been carefully established and described by independent journalists, participants in the conflict and former comrades” Pat tells us, and then cites Ed Moloney’s book on the IRA. To say Ed or the contributors to the farcical Boston tapes project were Gerry fans would be to fall a little short of the truth.   So here’s a question: who are these ‘independent journalists’?  Who are the “participants in the conflict and former comrades”?  I think you’ll find that  every last one of them has their own hostile agenda against republicanism and /or Gerry Adams. There seems to be  an endless conveyor belt of questions about Gerry being in the IRA, but  when he says that he was always a supporter of the IRA they don’t seem much interested.

Odd, that. If I introduced you to two people, one of whom was in a political violence group and one who was an unreserved supporter of the political violence group, would you not throw up your hands and say “Sure what’s the difference? One supports violent action, one carries out violent action. They’re clearly together on the political violence question.”

So why is it that the south’s mainstream media keep asking Gerry Adams a question that he’s answered a hundred times?  If he was one day to say “Yes I was in the IRA”, what would happen? There would be columns and commentaries and people wagging their finger joyfully and saying “See? I knew that he was all the time!”

In which case, why did you keep asking him if he was?

I have no idea if Gerry Adams was in the IRA. And if we assume for a moment that he was, what difference does it make whether he says he was or not? The suspicion is that this may be a legal matter, maybe kind of like someone in court who pleads ‘Not guilty’ because to say s/he is guilty, means that they’d be immediately punished.

Anyway, here’s my guess, and nothing that Miriam said in the 2013 interview or Pat Leahy’s article today indicates otherwise: the idea is that if Adams is painted black enough, even though he’s no longer head of Sinn Féin, an admission of IRA membership might somehow damage the Sinn Féin party. Mind you, reading Pat or remembering Miriam, they both have an energetic go at doing the inextricably linked thing and reminding people that Adams is Sinn Féin and that Sinn Féin has the shadow of past IRA violence hanging over it.

Just like Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have all those atrocities from the Tan war and the civil war hanging over them. Right, Pat? Right, Miriam?