It’s a bit late in the day for Adams to whinge about media treatment

IT WOULD be an extraordinary turn of events if Gerry Adams was to see his political career ended by the gross misjudgment he exercised in his greatly delayed reporting of his niece’s allegations of sexual abuse against her father, his brother Liam.

It is not that the Sinn Féin leader’s failures in dealing appropriately with what he knew when he knew it are not serious, because they clearly are, and that the sexual abuse of children is not an exceptionally serious matter, which most clearly it is.

But it is still strange that a man whose career has prospered despite being, at best, an apologist for the many murders committed by the IRA, and at worst, one of its leading commanders, something he denies, would be brought down by this, rather than by the death and destruction the IRA carried out with Sinn Féin’s endorsement.

Adams is in whinge mode at present, outraged that his political enemies are out to get him and that the media is following the story of how he dealt with Liam Adams’s rape of his daughter Áine, and the eventual conviction, in great detail.

But what does he expect? Of course his political opponents are trying to take advantage but that doesn’t mean that the points they make aren’t correct and valid. Maybe some elements of the media are making up for being too soft on Adams in recent times — he and Sinn Féin have been very quick to demonise the media as “anti-peace process” when not playing along with the Sinn Féin peacemaker agenda and it got to some journalists who have pulled their punches in cowardly fashion — but again, coverage of this issue is legitimate and necessary.

As it happens, it is easy enough to understand why Adams didn’t go to the police in 1987. Given the depth of antipathy between Adams and the RUC at the time it would have been extraordinary had Adams decided to turn his brother over to the RUC. Áine Adams, as a 14-year-old, withdrew her complaint to the police, apparently fearing that they would use it to gather intelligence on republicans in her family, including her uncle Gerry.

Who put that in her mind, at a time when she wanted justice and protection? Was she old enough and canny enough to realise that the IRA remained very active and that informing against one of its members was punishable by death? There is no suggestion that Liam Adams was an IRA man. Remarkably though, Gerry Adams told an inquiry conducted by Declan Kearney, the Sinn Féin chairman, that he only became aware that Liam was a party member in 1997, when Liam lived and worked in Dundalk.

Apparently Gerry ordered his brother to leave the party, but did not warn local members. He has subsequently said that he always believed Áine despite Liam’s denials in 1987. If so, why didn’t he act earlier against his brother? His problems grow though because of what happened this century. Liam Adams apparently told Gerry in 2000 that one aspect of the allegation was true. That was the time that the Sinn Féin leader, in the peace process era, should have reported his brother.

He didn’t. Instead when Liam subsequently moved back to Belfast why did Gerry let him live with him and help get a job in a youth club associated with Clonard monastery? And why did Gerry allow Liam to reinvolve himself with Sinn Féin in west Belfast in 2000 if that was the year that Liam made his limited confession of sexual abuse, short of rape, to Gerry? This was also the same year Sinn Féin introduced guidelines to deal with allegations of sexual and child abuse but Adams did not inform his own party of the most serious allegations against his brother until they were made public in 2007.

To have assumed that Liam was not a potential danger to other children was another frightening misjudgment, one that Gerry was not qualified to make.

Gerry Adams has attempted to make much of the fact that he reported Liam to the police in 2009 and that he subsequently gave evidence against him at his criminal trial. The latter action stands to his credit; it must have been very hard for one sibling to give evidence against another, even if it was the right thing to do.

However, it has been confirmed that he did only after he knew that UTV was about to broadcast a major documentary item on the incest within his family. That decision raises questions about cynicism. It is also the case that Adams was photographed, laughing, in the company of his brother after 2000.

The way Liam Adams moved around various parts of Sinn Féin, north and south, prior to that date and went to the United States for a while, bears striking resemblance to the way the Catholic Church in Ireland moved its errant members around from parish to parish, allowing them to evade justice but also putting more and more children at risk from their evil.

Back in 2009, when commenting about child abuse by clerics in the Dublin diocese, the Sinn Féin vice president Mary Lou McDonald, said anybody found to have covered up the abuse of children should be arrested and face the full rigours of the law. “Anyone, including gardaí, found to be complicit in the cover-up of child abuse must be arrested and made to face the full rigours of the law,” she said.

In March 2010, Martin McGuinness, alongside Gerry Adams the most important person in Sinn Féin, said that Cardinal Sean Brady should be “considering his position” after the revelation of his failures to report the notorious paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth to the police. I wrote in this column at the time that was a remarkable thing for McGuinness to say, given what was known then by the public about the dysfunctional Adams family.

THREE years on and Adams is complaining about “the despicable manner in which this issue is being dealt with by the DUP and others, and by some cynical elements of the media”. He said this has become trial by media and a witch-hunt. A sense of proportion is something that Adams himself is missing.

“I know that I have committed no offence, and I know that I did what I considered to be the right thing, and that I co-operated fully with the PSNI, the Public Prosecution Service, with the court,” he has said. But when and why? And why should we believe his version of events, when we know that Adams’s history is to say almost anything that is convenient to his political needs of the day? His loyal supporters in Sinn Féin, who treat him as an iconic figure and who believe he can do no wrong, are facing a test of their intelligence. Can they forgive him anything? Do they always believe, as Adams seems to, that he is a victim of some devious, perfidious plot to destroy him, when this wound clearly is self-inflicted?

* The Last Word with Matt Cooper is broadcast on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm.