Adams remains selective about aspects of past

IN The Man Who Fell To Earth David Bowie is an alien struggling to understand his new surroundings and overshadowed by his past.

In The Man Who Fell To Louth, Gerry Adams plays a strangely similar role.

“Everyone loves you, Gerry,” a 13-year-old boy shouts from his bike as the Sinn Féin leader canvasses a bleak estate on the outskirts of Dundalk.

“I wouldn’t say that,” replies Mr Adams with a knowing self-awareness.

After a string of campaign mistakes, a solid performance in the five-way leaders debate has gone some way to dent the image of him as a Northern carpet-bagger, a Republican with little knowledge of the real Republic.

However, the IRA will not go away, you know — and Mr Adams grows ever more impatient with each new repetition of the three little letters with the big shadows.

Throw into the mix his casual use of the word “terrorism” to describe the universal social charge, and you have a situation which is, well, explosive.

Mr Adams even invokes the British government’s definition of terrorism — attacks on the civilian population — as justification for his remarks.

But if he accepts the legitimacy of Britain’s take on what is, or is not, terrorism, then surely the IRA’s ceasefire-busting attack on Canary Wharf which left two Muslim shopkeepers dead in 1996 must be terrorism?

“It may or may not be,” he announces with the air of calculated ambiguity we have become so used to in the post-Good Friday Agreement shifting re-assessment of history, before adding: “But it’s in the past. I regret any deaths. The war has been ended, we are now in a totally new era and my remark has to be seen in the context of the attacks on me by Micheál Martin and others who are sponsoring the most savage budget attacks on the people.”

So, if the war is over, why not confirm what many seem to assume and reveal a past IRA role?

The face tightens and the tired looking eyes harden: “We will get the answer to whatever people assume when they get to cast their votes,” he announces, refusing to entertain the idea that if people think he is not telling the truth about the IRA, they are less likely to trust him on the economy.

Though denying IRA involvement, he is deliberately nuanced about the organisation he is always defined against: “I have never distanced myself from the IRA and I never will.”

A Sinn Féin official later points out that four people have been charged in the past six months in the North for “activities” said to have been carried out in the early 1970s, though none just for membership. Mr Adams clearly wants to pick and choose which parts of his past remain another country and which he takes with him to his inevitable new Dáil home — to where he is almost certain to be elected, perhaps even emerging as leader of the opposition if FF continues in meltdown and Labour arrests its decline and enters coalition.

A decline in part due to SF surging-up Labour’s left flank with its consensus-busting burn-the-bankers mantra.

The old El Paso cliches are still redolent in Dundalk, a dank border town which remains alive with a resilient dissident Republican element however much Mr Adams tries to downplay it.

Modern Sinn Féin grew out of a single issue political idea and has adapted ideology and strategy to enhance that central theme.

Just as the Greens are wrongly assumed to be a left wing party, Sinn Féin plays its appeal differently through the country. In Louth and the border areas the hard-line Republican message is much more to the fore, while the left-wing support base in Dublin and other cities hear a solidly socialistic world view.

But Mr Adams is also keen to present an alternate view of himself — he wants Jesus as one of his ideal dinner party guests, and insists the only thing that keeps him awake at night is reading.

The SF leader likes to remind people he was beaten unconscious half a dozen times during British interrogations, so how does he feel about the Crown conferring the honorary title of Baron of the Manor of Northstead on him in order for him to resign as an MP?

“They have given me many names, none of which I wanted, or accepted. They made me a prisoner at Her Majesty’s Pleasure — but I had no wish to pleasure her majesty,” he deadpans, glad of non IRA-dominated dialogue.

We will never know the real Adams, and he is yet to grasp that calculated ambiguity now works against him as his image can be so easily manipulated by others. The same Dáil leaders who hailed him as a statesman in the North now deride him as a snake-oil salesman in the South.

Mr Adams has fallen to Louth, it remains to be seen how much of the Republic will fall to him.