Gerry Adams should have won an Oscar for his lifetime of denials
I know Adi well enough to know that her first reaction to being the centre of Oscar attention will be to seek to use it to save more lives.
But I hope she enjoyed the parties too nobody deserves it more.
Just before the Oscars began on Sunday night, I watched Gerry Adams being interviewed by Sean O'Rourke on The Week in Politics. Not for the first time, I wondered who could possibly beat Adams if he were ever nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor.
Several times, Sean O'Rourke asked him about the truth in connection with the allegation that Gerry Adams has been a senior member of the IRA. Each time Adams responded by referring to the consistency of his position that he had denied membership every time he was asked. He denied it in interviews, he said, just as he had denied it in the past under interrogation.
It was a very unusual contrast, and one that O'Rourke cleverly allowed to just hang in the air. The contrast was between truth and consistency although he didn't say it in so many words, Gerry Adams seemed to be saying that the truth didn't matter, as long as he was consistent in his position.
The logic behind this has always eluded me. Provisional Sinn Féin and its leadership can be described as many things, but consistent is not one of them. Their route to where they are now has involved a willingness to say, and do, whatever is necessary at any given time. If the truth serves, use it. If a lie is necessary, utter it. There can be few better examples in our modern history of the end being regarded as justifying the means.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean by that. In his speech to his Árd Fheis on Saturday night, Gerry Adams referred to a number of events from around ten years ago. He used the examples he quoted to show how much things had changed in the intervening period. Among other things, he referred to the 17 people who had died in the Shankill and Greysteel massacres of that year.
The Shankill massacre happened, actually, in October 1993. In the middle of that month, the IRA issued a statement saying that it supported what was then known as the Hume/Adams process, and saying that the process could provide the basis for peace. A week later, a young IRA volunteer called Thomas Begley carried a bomb into Frizzell's chip shop on the Shankill Road. When it exploded prematurely, it killed two members of the Frizzell family and eight other people, including a seven-year-old girl who was clutching her mother's hand. Begley was among the dead.
Over the days that followed that massacre, six people were killed in individual acts of retaliation, and then two loyalist gunmen opened fire in the Rising Sun bar in the small town of Greysteel near Derry, killing six more people.
Gerry Adams didn't go into all that detail. For instance, he didn't mention and his audience presumably didn't need to be reminded that of all the people killed in those atrocities, only one had his coffin carried by Gerry Adams. That was Thomas Begley, the young man who had perpetrated the Shankill massacre and killed himself in the process.
Adams never apologised to anyone for what seemed at the time like an act of the utmost callousness towards the other victims of that massacre.
What is often forgotten now is that Adams' act almost derailed what was then a much more fragile process of development. The Downing Street Declaration had yet to be published, the first IRA ceasefire was nine months away, and the hope of peace seemed to have been dashed before it was started.
Gerry Adams' supporters would, of course, argue that if he had not carried Begley's coffin, his moral authority to ultimately deliver peace would have been weakened.
It does beg the question, doesn't it, as to how a man is prepared to go to those lengths, and still pretends to be affronted when it is suggested to him that he was once a member of the same organisation in whose cause Begley died?
ANOTHER example, now often forgotten. The "crisis" in the peace process referred to by Martin McGuinness on Sunday is caused, essentially, by the refusal of unionism to negotiate the return of the Assembly and the operation of the Executive in Northern Ireland.
Provisional Sinn Féin are the Assembly's greatest advocates, the ones most determined to secure a cross-party government.
As they say themselves, Sinn Féin is the largest pro-Agreement party. But who remembers the collapse of the first IRA ceasefire, in February 1996?
The IRA has never said precisely why they abandoned peace at that point, but most people directly involved in the process at the time believe that the bombing of Canary Wharf was caused by John Major's decision to set up an elected Assembly in Northern Ireland.
The ceasefire broke down almost immediately after a series of events.
President Clinton came to Ireland in an atmosphere of great hope. The International Body on Decommissioning, chaired by George Mitchell, issued its widely praised report on how the impasse on decommissioning might be addressed. And then John Major made an unfortunate speech in the House of Commons, which seemed to favour an Assembly over any of the other Mitchell recommendations. And the republican movement which is now the greatest advocate of the assembly ended its ceasefire over the original creation of the assembly.
Listening to the tone, almost of moral superiority, that emerged from the Sinn Fein Árd Fheis over the weekend, it struck me that we all need to remember. Politics isn't perfect, and there are very few of us in politics who can claim never to have made a mistake. But to be lectured and patronised by people whose track record and history over the last 30 years has included a refusal, even to this day, to acknowledge any moral responsibility for the atrocities of their own past is impossible to take.
For all the years that Sinn Féin was involved in supporting violence, others on this island were involved in political campaigns for the social and economic justice that Sinn Féin now claims ownership off.
Like much else they have claimed in the past, their commitment to democracy and equality needs to be tested in action. Nothing they say should simply be taken at face value.
Sinn Féin and its leadership have made a signal contribution to peace I have always acknowledged that. Their involvement in the peace process is, to a considerable extent however, a way of putting right some of the terrible things they have done themselves. But they have never admitted that, and perhaps they can't see it. Perhaps they can't afford to see it.
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