Gerry Adams

Gerry Adams ex Wiki
The Wiki gives some background and skates over the real issue, to wit, how many kills he got. It completely ignores the murder of Jean McConville. Others do not. It also skates over his cover up of his brother's evil. See under for more and better details.

 

Gerry Adams and Illegal Immigrants [ 27 August 2006 ]
Adams wants Ireland over run by blacks. He was at their demonstration telling anyone who cared to listen. Perhaps the men of the IRA who care about Ireland will wonder whether Adams is on their side, or ever was for that matter.

 

Kevin Myers On Adams And The Book Voices From The Grave
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Kevin Myers: All republican violence has failed in its aims -- no one in 1916 wanted what we have today

THE electoral defeat of Peter Robinson in east Belfast effectively spells the end of political Paisleyism in the city. And Paisley, rather than the Provisional IRA, was perhaps the true begetter of the Troubles. They began at his command. They ended when he went into government and he was able to bring about what no government in Dublin, London, or Washington could achieve: the disarmament of the Provisional IRA.

In other words, a return to the status quo ante, for the IRA was effectively a disarmed force when Paisleyism unsheathed the sword of Protestant bigotry nearly 50 years ago.

And on the nationalist side, he had a most obliging enemy in that small band of republican lunatics who believed that you could befriend a political community by murdering enough of its members. Between them, these conjoined twins ruined thousands of lives.

Now, they have slouched off into the history books, without recant, regret or remorse. But they haven't gone away -- these political vampires wait in their tombs for the sunlight of reason to fade again, as it has faded so often before, and then they can slide the stone slab aside and once more stalk the earth.

Meanwhile, republican mythologists are forging enduring falsehoods. Brendan Hughes created his particular legend to be perpetuated after his death -- but is this not how republicans like their mumbo-jumbo to be revered, when they are in that hereafter, to which they have already consigned so many?

For such is the credulous nature of nationalist memory that a baseless myth, conveyed with suitable powerful conviction, will sweep aside historical truth. That is how it has always been. Fiction becomes part of the syllabus, while inconvenient truth vanishes.

This is especially true in west Belfast, whose mood of semi-permanent hysteria is sustained by a diet of mood-altering myths. What revelations, one wonders, would cause the electorate to reject Gerry Adams?

They know about Jean McConville. They know about Bloody Friday. They know about claims that he shielded his brother from child-rape allegations. They know about the informers who worked alongside him. It makes no difference. He is king of his kingless kingdom.

They worship myth there. Even when I lived in Belfast, children spoke lovingly of the Raglan Street ambush in 1921. This was nothing, a dismal gun attack on a Crossley tender and the murder of a single police officer, (Thomas Conlon, a Catholic from Roscommon).

Protestant attacks on Catholic areas then led to 20 deaths. The lesson from all these murders should surely have been: do not kill members of the security forces within such a bitterly divided community. Instead, republicans settled down to a decade or so of whingeing, balladic victimhood, before starting more of the same.

One of the myths that was celebrated by both Adams in his fact-free autobiography and Hughes in his tape-recorded reminiscences -- now available in Ed Moloney's 'Voices from the Grave', is the much vaunted "coup" against the British army's undercover unit, The Four Square Laundry.

A huge number of British intelligence officers were allegedly killed. Untrue. Just one soldier was killed, as the British army admits. But that's it: no more.

I know. As a young journalist hot on the trail of a story, I broke into the abandoned flat in Antrim Road, where an IRA massacre of British operatives had occurred. To my immense distress, I found no blood, no bullet holes, no disturbance, and worst of all, no story -- instead, just shiny Ministry of Defence toilet paper in the loo, and tins of MoD beans in the kitchen.

Hughes triumphantly spoke of the IRA's "execution" of two unnamed SAS captives. Let me name them now -- Captain Dent and Sergeant Davies. Fantasy again. Both men escaped.

The greatest hallucination of Hughes's recollections was the imaginary conspiracy which led to the actual murder of eight "British agents" (the so-called Heatherington gang) by the IRA and UDA, working together in an ecumenical project that was pure Kafka.

To deny membership of the conspiracy was confirmation of one's participation. To admit it was to die.

ONE of the IRA interrogators told me: "We kept torturing them till they told us what we wanted to hear. And it was all shite. But then we nutted them any way."

Hughes confessed to the IRA's cigarette-end torture of gang-suspects. But of course, these revelations have escaped the censure of that curiously elastic moral organ, the conscience of west Belfast. Yet as Hughes ruefully reflected: "As everything has turned out, not one single death was worth it."

Well, what a surprise. It never is. All republican violence in Ireland has failed in its aims. No one in 1916 wanted what we have today: a divided Anglophone island, with British rule in the North being implemented by one set of heirs to the Rising and limited self-government being implemented in Dublin by another set of heirs, within the most capitalist society in Europe.

Meanwhile other, more marginalised heirs chafe in their covens, waiting for the day when they can kill again.

All they need is another Paisley and another triumphalist 1916 commemoration. They have the latter, slated for 2016. Is another Paisley gestating in Ulster's toxic womb? We have six years to find out.

kmyers@independent.ie
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Kev is a first class journalist who was there on the day but this sounds a bit convoluted to me, an outsider blissfully ignorant of most of the thoroughly nasty goings on.

 

Gerry Adams Had Jean McConville Disappeared
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Gerry Adams should be arrested and questioned about the murder of a Protestant mother of ten children after a former Provisional IRA bomber made allegations about his role, a daughter of the dead woman told The Times yesterday.

Mr. Adams, who has always denied being an IRA member and who last night presented a Channel Four documentary about Jesus, rejected the allegations made by Dolours Price, who in 1973 was convicted of a London bombing campaign which blew up the Old Bailey. But Ms Price will this week give vital new information to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims Remains (ICLVR), an organization established in 1999 by the British and Irish governments to search for the bodies of 15 people who were “disappeared” — murdered and secretly buried by republican terrorist groups.
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I never liked the man; politician, liar, evasive, on the make; much like Blair in fact.

 

Gerry Adams Should Be Arrested Over The Murder Of Jean McConville
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Brendan “darkie” Hughes, a former commander of the IRA in Belfast, has claimed posthumously that Gerry Adams ordered the killing and burial of Jean McConville, the mother-of-10 shot dead by the IRA in 1972. He also suggested that Adams gave the order for the Provisional IRA to hang one of its own members in Long Kesh in June 1973 after the 22-year-old cracked under police questioning. Hughes also boasted that he personally ran a personation campaign for Adams’s election as MP in west Belfast in 1987, and again in the council elections of 1989, stealing a “massive” number of votes.......

“I find it so difficult to come to terms [with] the fact that this man has turned his back on everything that we ever did,” Hughes said in an interview before he died in 2008. “I never carried out a major [IRA] operation without the okay or the order from Gerry [Adams]. And for him to sit in his plush office in Westminster or Stormont or wherever and deny it, I mean it’s like Hitler denying that there was ever a Holocaust.”
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Adams has moved on. Adams has plenty of money coming in. You have to believe that. Services past, present and future; of course that applies to murder threats as well.

 

Gerry Adams Connection To Jean McConville Murder May Be Proven [ 10 January 2012 ]
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The British government is waiting to hear whether a U.S. appeals court will allow the release of interviews with former IRA members purportedly accusing Gerry Adams of running a secret death squad.

A court in Boston heard evidence from lawyers on both sides of a protracted battle over tapes from a Boston College oral history project which obtained testimonies from two convicted IRA members between 2001 and 2006. Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, has always denied being an IRA member, let alone heading a security unit which was responsible for kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected informants....

Mrs. McConville was abducted from her Belfast home in December 1972 by a gang of up to 12 IRA members on suspicion of passing information to the British Army - a claim her family deny. After being tortured, she was shot in the back of the head and buried on a beach across the border on Shelling Hill beach. Her body was not discovered until 2003.
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Anyone who believes that Adams was not in it up to his neck really should see a good psychiatrist.

 

Gerry Adams ex Wiki
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Gerard "Gerry" Adams, MLA, MP (Irish: Gearóid Mac Ádhaimh; born 6 October 1948) is an Irish republican politician and abstentionist Westminster Member of Parliament for Belfast West. He is the president of Sinn Féin, the political party at the top of the latest Northern Ireland election polls amidst a three-way split in the traditionally dominant unionist vote. Sinn Féin is the second largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly and fifth largest party in the Republic of Ireland.

From the late 1980s onwards, Adams has been an important figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, initially following contact by the then Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume and subsequently with the Irish and British governments and then other parties. In 2005, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) indicated that its armed campaign was over and that it is now exclusively committed to democratic politics. Under Adams, Sinn Féin changed its traditional policy of abstentionism towards Oireachtas Éireann, the parliament of the Republic of Ireland, in 1986 and later took seats in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. However, Sinn Féin retains a policy of abstentionism towards the Westminster Parliament, but since 2002, receives allowances for staff and takes up offices in the House of Commons.

Family background
Adam's parents, Gerry Adams Sr. and Annie Hannaway came from strong republican backgrounds. Adams' grandfather, also called Gerry Adams, had been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) during the Irish War of Independence. Two of Adams' uncles, Dominic and Patrick Adams, had been interned by the governments in Belfast and Dublin. Although it is reported that his uncle Dominic was a one-time IRA chief of staff, J. Bowyer Bell, in his book, The Secret Army: The IRA 1916 (Irish Academy Press), states that Dominic Adams was a senior figure in the IRA of the mid-1940s. Gerry Sr. joined the IRA at aged sixteen. In 1942, he participated in an IRA ambush on a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) patrol but was himself shot, arrested and sentenced to eight years imprisonment.

Adams' maternal great-grandfather, Michael Hannaway, was a member of the Fenians during their dynamiting campaign in England in the 1860s and 1870s. Michael's son, Billy, was election agent for Éamon de Valera in 1918 in West Belfast but refused to follow de Valera into democratic and constitutional politics upon the formation of Fianna Fáil. Annie Hannaway was a member of Cumann na mBan, the women's branch of the IRA. Three of her brothers (Alfie, Liam and Tommy) were known IRA members.

Early life
Adams attended St Finian's Primary School on the Falls Road where he was taught by De La Salle brothers. Having passed the eleven-plus exam in 1960, he then attended St Mary's Christian Brothers Grammar School. He left St. Mary's with six O-levels, and became a barman. He was increasingly involved in the Irish republican movement, joining Sinn Féin and Fianna Éireann in 1964, after being radicalised by the Divis Street riots during the general election campaign.

When Third Way Magazine asked Adams whether he was a Christian he said: 'I like the sense of there being a God, and I do take succour now from the collective comfort of being at a Mass or another religious event where you can be anonymous and individual – just a sense of community at prayer and of paying attention to that spiritual dimension which is in all of us; and I also take some succour in a private, solitary way from being able to reflect on those things.'

In 1971, Adams married Collette McArdle, by whom he has three children.

Early political career
In the late 1960s, a civil rights campaign developed in Northern Ireland. Adams was an active supporter and joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. However, the civil rights movement was met with protests from loyalist counter-demonstrators. This culminated in August 1969, when Northern Ireland cities like Belfast and Derry erupted in major rioting and British troops were called in at the request of the Government of Northern Ireland (see 1969 Northern Ireland Riots).

Adams was active in Sinn Féin at this time, siding with the Provisionals in the split of 1970.^{[citation needed]} In August 1971, internment was reintroduced to Northern Ireland under the Special Powers Act 1922. Adams was interned in March 1972, on HMS Maidstone, but was released in June to take part in secret, but abortive talks in London. The IRA negotiated a short-lived truce with the British government and an IRA delegation met with the British Home Secretary, William Whitelaw at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The delegation included Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Sean Mac Stiofain (IRA Chief of Staff), Daithi O'Conaill, Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell and Dublin solicitor Myles Shevlin. The IRA insisted Adams be included in the meeting and he was released from internment to participate. Following the failure of the talks, he played a central role in planning the bomb blitz on Belfast known as Bloody Friday. He was re-arrested in July 1973 and interned at the Long Kesh internment camp. After taking part in an IRA-organised escape attempt, he was sentenced to a period of imprisonment. During this time he wrote articles in the paper An Phoblacht under the by-line "Brownie" where he criticized the strategy and policy of Ruari O'Bradaigh and Billy McKee. He was also highly crticical of a decision taken in Belfast by McKee to assassinate members of the rival Official IRA, who had been on ceasefire since 1972.

During the 1981 hunger strike, Adams played an important policy-making role, which saw the emergence of his party as a political force. In 1983, he was elected president of Sinn Féin and became the first Sinn Féin MP elected to the British House of Commons since Phil Clarke and Tom Mitchell in the mid-1950s. Following his election as MP for Belfast West, the British government lifted a ban on him travelling to Great Britain. In line with Sinn Féin policy, he refused to take his seat in the House of Commons.

On 14 March 1984 in central Belfast, Adams was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt when several Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) gunmen fired about 20 shots into the car in which he was traveling. He was hit in the neck, shoulder and arm. After the shooting, he was rushed to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where he underwent surgery to remove the three bullets which had entered his body. Under-cover plain clothes police officers seized three suspects who were later convicted and sentenced. One of the three was John Gregg, who would be killed by Loyalists in 2003. Adams claimed that the British army had prior knowledge of the attack and allowed it to go ahead.

Allegations of IRA membership
Adams has stated repeatedly that he has never been a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). However, journalists such as Ed Moloney, Peter Taylor, Mark Urban and historian Richard English have all named Adams as part of the IRA leadership since the 1970s. Adams has denied Moloney's claims, calling them "libellous".

 

President of Sinn Féin
In 1978, Gerry Adams became joint vice-president of Sinn Féin and a key figure in directing a challenge to the Sinn Féin leadership of President Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and joint vice- president Dáithí Ó Conaill.

The 1975 IRA-British truce is often viewed as the event that began the challenge to the original Provisional Sinn Féin leadership, which was said to be Southern-based and dominated by southerners like Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill. However, the Chief of Staff of the IRA at the time, Seamus Twomey, was a senior figure from Belfast. Others in the leadership were also Northern based, including Billy McKee from Belfast. Adams (allegedly) rose to become the most senior figure in the IRA Northern Command on the basis of his absolute rejection of anything but military action, but this conflicts with the fact that during his time in prison Adams came to reassess his approach and became more political.

One of the core reasons that the Provisional IRA and provisional Sinn Féin were founded, in December 1969 and January 1970, respectively, was that people like Ó Brádaigh, O'Connell and McKee opposed participation in constitutional politics. The other reason was the failure of the Goulding leadership to provide for the defence of nationalist areas. When, at the December 1969 IRA convention and the January 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis the delegates voted to participate in the Dublin (Leinster House), Belfast (Stormont) and London (Westminster) parliaments, the organizations split. Gerry Adams, who had joined the Republican Movement in the early 1960s, sided with the Provisionals.

In Long Kesh in the mid-1970s, and writing under the pseudonym "Brownie" in Republican News, Adams called on Republicans for increased political activity, especially at a local level. The call resonated with younger Northern people, many of whom had been active in the Provisional IRA but had not necessarily been highly active in Sinn Féin. In 1977, Adams and Danny Morrison drafted the address of Jimmy Drumm at the Annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration at Bodenstown. The Address was viewed as watershed in that Drumm acknowledged that the war would be a long one and that success depended on political activity that would complement the IRA's armed campaign. For some, this wedding of politics and armed struggle culminated in Danny Morrison's statement at the 1981 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in which he asked "Who here really believes we can win the war through the Ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland". For others, however, the call to link political activity with armed struggle had been clearly defined in Sinn Féin policy and in the Presidential Addresses of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, but it had not resonated with the young Northerners.

Even after the election of Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone, a part of the mass mobilization associated with the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike by republican prisoners in the H blocks of the Maze prison (known as Long Kesh by Republicans), Adams was cautious about the level of political involvement by Sinn Féin. Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, called an election for June 1981. At an Ard Chomhairle meeting, Adams recommended that they contest only four constituencies which were in border counties. Instead, H-Block/Armagh Candidates contested nine constituencies and elected two TDs. This, along with the election of Bobby Sands, was a precursor to a big electoral breakthrough in elections in 1982 to the Northern Ireland Assembly. Adams, Danny Morrison, Martin McGuinness, Jim McAllister, and Owen Carron were elected as abstentionists. The SDLP had announced before the election that it would not take any seats and so its 14 elected representatives also abstained from participating in the Assembly and it was a failure. The 1982 election was followed by the 1983 Westminster election, in which Sinn Féin's vote increased and Gerry Adams was elected, as an abstentionist, as MP for West Belfast. It was in 1983 that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh resigned as President of Sinn Féin and was succeeded by Gerry Adams.

Republicans had long claimed that the only legitimate Irish state was the Irish Republic declared in the Proclamation of the Republic of 1916, which they considered to be still in existence. In their view, the legitimate government was the IRA Army Council, which had been vested with the authority of that Republic in 1938 (prior to the Second World War) by the last remaining anti-Treaty deputies of the Second Dáil. Adams continued to adhere to this claim of republican political legitimacy until quite recently - however, in his 2005 speech to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis he explicitly rejected it.

As a result of this non-recognition, Sinn Féin had abstained from taking any of the seats they won in the British or Irish parliaments. At its 1986 Ard Fheis, Sinn Féin delegates passed a resolution to amend the rules and constitution that would allow its members to sit in the Dublin parliament (Leinster House/Dáil Éireann). At this, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh led a small walkout, just as he and Sean Mac Stiofain had done sixteen years earlier with the creation of Provisional Sinn Féin. This minority, which rejected dropping the policy of abstentionism, now nominally distinguishes itself from Provisional Sinn Féin by using the name Republican Sinn Féin (or Sinn Féin Poblachtach), and maintains that they are the true Sinn Féin republicans.

Adams' leadership of Sinn Féin was supported by a Northern-based cadre that included people like Danny Morrison and Martin McGuinness. Over time, Adams and others pointed to Republican electoral successes in the early and mid-1980s, when hunger strikers Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty were elected to the British House of Commons and Dáil Éireann respectively, and they advocated that Sinn Féin become increasingly political and base its influence on electoral politics rather than paramilitarism. The electoral effects of this strategy were shown later by the election of Adams and to the House of Commons.

Voice Ban
Adams's prominence as an Irish Republican leader was increased by the ban on the media broadcast of his voice (the ban actually covered eleven republican and loyalist organisations, but in practice Adams was the only one prominent enough to appear regularly on TV). This ban was imposed by the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher on 19 October 1988, the reason given being to "starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend" after the BBC interviewed Martin McGuinness and Adams had been the focus of a row over an edition of After Dark, an intended Channel 4 discussion programme which was never made.

A similar ban, known as Section 31, had been law in the Republic of Ireland since the 1970s. However, media outlets soon found ways around the ban, initially by the use of subtitles, but later and more commonly by the use of an actor reading his words over the images of him speaking. One actor who voiced Adams was Paul Loughran.

This ban was lampooned in cartoons and satirical TV shows, such as Spitting Image, and in The Day Today and was criticised by freedom of speech organisations and British media personalities, including BBC Director General John Birt and BBC foreign editor John Simpson. The ban was lifted by British Prime Minister John Major on 17 September 1994.

Moving into mainstream politics
Sinn Féin continued its policy of refusing to sit in the Westminster Parliament even after Adams won the Belfast West constituency. He lost his seat to Joe Hendron of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in the 1992 general election. However, he regained it at the next election in May 1997.

Under Adams, Sinn Féin appeared to move away from being a political voice of the Provisional IRA to becoming a professionally organised political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

SDLP leader John Hume, MP, identified the possibility that a negotiated settlement might be possible and began secret talks with Adams in 1988. These discussions led to unofficial contacts with the British Northern Ireland Office under the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, and with the government of the Republic under Charles Haughey – although both governments maintained in public that they would not negotiate with "terrorists".

These talks provided the groundwork for what was later to be the Belfast Agreement, as well as the milestone Downing Street Declaration and the Joint Framework Document.

These negotiations led to the IRA ceasefire in August 1994. Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, who had replaced Haughey and who had played a key role in the Hume/Adams dialogue through his Special Advisor Martin Mansergh, regarded the ceasefire as permanent. However, the slow pace of developments contributed in part to the (wider) political difficulties of the British government of John Major and the consequent reliance on Ulster Unionist Party votes in the House of Commons, led the IRA to end its ceasefire and resume the campaign.

A re-instituted ceasefire later followed as part of the negotiations strategy, which saw teams from the British and Irish governments, the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP, Sinn Féin and representatives of loyalist paramilitary organizations, under the chairmanship of former United States Senator George Mitchell, produced the Belfast Agreement (also called the Good Friday Agreement as it was signed on Good Friday, 1998). Under the agreement, structures were created reflecting the Irish and British identities of the people of Ireland, with a British-Irish Council and a Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly created.

Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic's constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, which claimed sovereignty over all of Ireland, were reworded, and a power-sharing Executive Committee was provided for. As part of their deal, Sinn Féin agreed to abandon its abstentionist policy regarding a "six-county parliament", as a result taking seats in the new Stormont-based Assembly and running the education and health and social services ministries in the power-sharing government.

Opponents in Republican Sinn Féin accused Sinn Féin of "selling out" by agreeing to participate in what it called "partitionist assemblies" in the Republic and Northern Ireland. However, Gerry Adams insisted that the Belfast Agreement provided a mechanism to deliver a united Ireland by non-violent and constitutional means, much as Michael Collins had said of the Anglo-Irish Treaty nearly 80 years earlier.

When Sinn Féin came to nominate its two ministers to the Northern Ireland Executive, for tactical reasons the party, like the SDLP and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), chose not to include its leader among its ministers. (When later the SDLP chose a new leader, it selected one of its ministers, Mark Durkan, who then opted to remain in the Committee.)

Adams remains the President of Sinn Féin, with Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin serving as Sinn Féin parliamentary leader in Dáil Éireann, and Daithí McKay as head of the Sinn Féin group in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Adams was re-elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly on 8 March 2007, and on 26 March 2007 he met with DUP leader Ian Paisley face-to-face for the first time, and the two came to an agreement regarding the return of the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland.

In January 2009, Adams attended the United States presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama as a guest of US Congressman Richard Neal.

On 6 May 2010, Adams was re-elected as MP for West Belfast garnering 71.1% of the vote.
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Do they still hate? Believe it.