Candidate’s arrest ‘a disgrace’ - Adams

Sinn Fein candidate Martin Ferris and his campaign workers are being subjected to a campaign of harassment by some police, party president Gerry Adams claimed tonight.

Mr Adams said the arrests of Sinn Fein’s Kerry North candidate and eight other party members in the area for alleged vigilante activities were a ‘‘disgrace’’ and he vowed to raise it with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern during Saint Patrick’s Week events in Washington.

Emerging from a meeting with US President George Bush’s special adviser on Northern Ireland, Richard Haass, the West Belfast MP said he was alarmed at Mr Ferris’s allegations that he was verbally and physically assaulted by police while he was questioned about a vigilante incident last December.

The Sinn Fein president said: ‘‘I think it is a disgrace what has happened in North Kerry - not just the arrest of Martin Ferris or his complaint about brutality but the ongoing harassment of the Sinn Fein organisation in that part of the county.

‘‘There’s obviously something wrong and it needs sorted out.’’

Mr Ferris was arrested in his home in Ardfert on Monday morning, was detained by Gardai for 12 hours and quizzed about an attack last December during which a man was driven to a remote part of the county, beaten up and his car burnt out.

The victim was abducted in Castleisland and bundled into his own car while his six year old daughter was abandoned by the roadside.

A caller to a local newspaper claimed responsibility for the attack which was believed to have been carried out by a group calling itself Concerned Parents Against Drugs.

Sinn Fein has been accused of running vigilante groups.

At the Fianna Fail party conference last weekend, the party’s Kerry North candidate Senator Dan Kiely condemned the vigilante groups.

He told the conference in Dublin: ‘‘There is only one police force in this country.

‘‘We live in a civil and crime free society. Anybody who does not accept the role of the Garda is undermining the authority of the state and that is an untenable position.

‘‘A vote for Fianna Fail is a vote for the Garda.’’

On his release Mr Ferris, a former gunrunner for the IRA, denied Sinn Fein was involved in vigilantism or that he was involved in the incident last December.

Mr Adams insisted tonight: ‘‘The reality is that Sinn Fein does support the Garda Siochana. (But) we do have criticisms of them.

‘‘We don’t support them harassing our election workers or one of our councillors and a prominent member of our party but these people will do everything but discuss the record of their party - I speak about the record of all the main conservative parties - on housing, the health services, on the squandering of the wealth in the boom years of the Celtic Tiger.

‘‘They will discuss everything other than that.

‘‘Clearly there is a very cynical, negative campaign going on which is aimed at frightening off that section of the voters who may from Fianna Fail give us a second or third preference or who may from Fine Gael or Labour.

‘‘This is what it is aimed at. It isn’t an accident.’’

Mr Adams added: ‘‘I haven’t talked to Martin but I have talked to his wife by telephone and I intend, if I see the Taoiseach, to raise the issue with him personally.’’