March 22, 2004 Adams is a Provo
by Susan McKay, Sunday Tribune

The late Eamon Collins claimed he got into trouble with Gerry Adams back in the early 1980's. The Newry IRA man had encouraged volunteers at an IRA funeral to continue to stomp their feet at the RUC, after one of Adams' circle asked them to stop. Adams told Collins the stomping "smacked of militarism and fascism". Collins retorted, "That's like something the Sticks would come out with."

Collins, in his book Killing Rage, said Adams looked shocked. "There was no greater insult that one Provo could level at another than to accuse him of following in the footsteps of the Official IRA.who had abandoned violence and embraced parliamentarism."

Afterwards, Collins said, he was upbraided by Danny Morrison and others. "Morrison told me Adams was not a stick, had never been a stick and would never be a stick. He explained at elaborate length Gerry Adams's republican bona fides. I had obviously touched a raw nerve."

Collins won't be touching any more raw nerves. He murdered in 1999. The Taoiseach, however, poked at a different one and came up with an apparently greater insult last weekend with his studiously casual comment that he had "always assumed Gerry Adams was in the IRA." Adams declared himself "flabbergasted". Was there was an "agenda" he demanded.

And of course, there was. Ahern has seen what happened to the SDLP after John Hume cajoled the hungry young crocodile into the parlour only to watch it grow fat and strong and start to eat the family. Fianna Fail isn't QUITE ready for the merger with Sinn Féin yet.

For now, PD minister for justice Michael McDowell's line prevails. The government and the DUP are agreed - Sinn Féin isn't fit to govern. "The DUP are straight talkers," said a government source, "Sinn Féin has to face it - they've got to lose the army."

Meanwhile, caught in an old lie, Adams is determined to lose his army history. He just wore that black beret back in the 1960's because it was the fashion. He was only joking when he wrote in 1976 in his An Phoblacht column, using his pseudonym of Brownie, "Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer.the course I take involves the use of physical force."

Back in war times, it was par for the course for IRA personnel to respond in the negative to the query, "Are you or have you ever been a member of the provisional IRA?" An admission would, after all, result in a jail sentence. There is no risk of that now, though one senior republican declined to comment on the Adams denial because, he said, "it is still an indictable offence."

Former IRA woman, Dolours Price, who bombed London in 1976, had no such qualms when, two years ago, she described Adams as having been her "commanding officer." Former Sinn Féin president, and now president of Republican Sinn Féin, Ruairi O'Bradaigh, laughed long and hard when asked was Adams ever a member of the IRA. "Well now, I don't want to be a felonsetter," he said. "But the record stands."

Adams' denial is nonsense. Equally so, Martin McGuinness's claim that he left the IRA soon after Bloody Sunday when hundreds of other young men and women were joining in justified outrage. HE could hardly say he was never involved since he'd been filmed strolling through bombed out Derry telling a BBC reporter he was second in command in the city. In his evidence to the Savile inquiry into Bloody Sunday he recorded this IRA role.

Asked by a reporter, late last year, WHY he left, McGuinness said it was for "personal reasons." About a decade ago, the BBC filmed Adams in West Belfast, praising the IRA to teenagers. Then a boy asked, "Were you ever in the IRA?" "No," Adams replied. "Why not?" asked the boy.

"It is such a ludicrous thing," said Ed Moloney, author of the acclaimed Secret History of the IRA. "It is so obvious to anyone who has followed Northern politics over the last 30 years and more that Adams is not only a member, he's a member of the leadership. The peace process couldn't have happened otherwise." It has always been precisely because of Adams' high standing in the IRA that the British have been interested in him.

The historians and journalists who are experts on Sinn Féin and the IRA - people like Moloney, Richard English, Brian Feeney and Tim Pat Coogan - agree that Adams had what English called an "impressive career" in the IRA. He joined in 1965, aged 16 and rose rapidly into its leadership. In 1972, the IRA called a ceasefire for talks on the precondition that he be released from internment to join the delegation meeting the then NI secretary, Willie Whitelaw. By 1977, Adams was on the ruling Army Council.

According to Moloney, Adams has a "Nelson Mandela complex". "He doesn't want to seem to have blood on his hands," he said. "Also, it helps in negotiations. It can't be disproved and he can keep up the fiction that he has to 'go to' the IRA."

There is some anger in republican circles about Adams' denial. "It is as if he is saying, 'I only hug trees - the rest of them blew up cities and slaughtered people," said Anthony McIntyre. Veteran republican, John Kelly, criticized Adams on similar grounds, and described Sinn Féin as a "dictatorship".

Martin Cunningham, ousted and replaced by Caitriona Ruane for the assembly elections, said some former IRA volunteers were angry that they were being pushed out by "these new peacetime republicans."

This isn't going to go away, you know. However, the Taioseach may rely on Teflon - Adams is coated with something stronger. His credibility may be dented, but he remains the unchallenged leader of the republican movement, and that is the Sinn Féin and the IRA of it.