Gerry Adams won’t name man who met Stacks
Continually pressed on whether he would name the senior IRA man the Stack family met or the man who drove them to a secret location, Mr Adams told a reporter: “You’re a journalist, you protect your sources. I protect my sources.”
He was also adamant he had kept all his commitments to the Stack family.
The Sinn Féin leader said a process had been agreed with Austin Stack in advance of the 2013 meeting with a senior IRA man and part of that was the process would be confidential.
Explaining why he would protect his sources, Mr Adams said he would do that not to protect the individuals involved but to “ensure when you get to the point of a truth recovery process that the families who wish to avail of it could do so with some possibility of closure”.
Mr Adams also said he told gardaí he would be willing to co-operate with them but said he had set out why commitments and confidential processes should not be breached, and that still remained his position.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Adams said he did not have any information on the murder of Brian Stack, who died 18 months after being shot in the neck in 1983.
He said the killing had been highlighted during the February election campaign and in the Dáil in recent weeks purely for “political point” scoring, he said.
Mr Adams said the Stack family came to him in 2013 and both sides had agreed a process to receive the answers they were seeking. “They wanted to know if the IRA killed their father, they wanted acknowledgement, they wanted closure. They said they didn’t want revenge.
“If you check out any of your records when we met the person involved, Austin reassured the person that he would keep this confidentiality, even if the guards came to him.”
However, he said that this agreement of confidentiality changed during the 2016 election campaign when the“negative campaign led by Micheál Martin” began.
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