Pass Gerry Adams a HazMat suit and give the peace process its last rites

THE HazMat suits on the gardaí were the puzzling bit. The guardians of the peace exiting a suburban bungalow clutching bags of money in their normal uniforms would have made great pictures.

The hooded white jump-suits added an unexpected visual motif.

Up until now, Dr Marie Cassidy, the State Pathologist, had something close to exclusivity in the wearing of HazMat suits, and cool and crisp she looks in them too. Gardaí looking like Caspar the Ghost was new.

Everybody else wanted to know if the notes were from the Belfast heist. I wanted to know what the hell the police officers were expecting to find wrapped around the bank notes. Either they thought they’d be submerged in a cesspit or surrounded with tubing filled with the Ebola virus or lightly powdered in anthrax.

Maybe those allegedly storing or transporting these large amounts of dubious dosh operate an escalating series of protective measures around it.

If they’re dealing with less than a hundred thou, a Daz box will do. Especially if the Daz box carries that warning to the effect that “contents may settle in the course of delivery”. Although in this case, contents got UNsettled in the process of delivery. Unsettled enough to bring Gerry Adams home from flogging his latest book to the Spaniards.

He looks 10 years older than he looked before the Belfast bank robbery. Michael McDowell, on the other hand, looks like a delighted balloon wearing swimming goggles, because of those spectacles that pull all his features into the middle of his face. And does he ever love telling Sinn Féin to reflect. He’s like a Reverend Mother catching a novice smoking in the refectory: the instruction to reflect comes with a trailing implication that the reflection had better lead at to a spot of self-flagellation or, better still, a little hara kiri in the courtyard.

If Michael McDowell is blooming, Gerry Adams looks as if someone has unexpectedly taken three pints of blood out of him.

He sounds it, too. None of the four key elements in Gerry Adams’ communication are working any more. First element is a monotone like a dentist’s drill, no offence to dentists. Second is a bullying authoritarianism toward interviewers: “Don’t interrupt me, don’t have the cheek to use that particular phrase to me, don’t you DARE ask me that question.” Third is a threatening authoritarianism towards everybody else: “I warn you against thinking this way or making that interpretation.” Fourth is the one which served him well for more than a decade but now has got its P45: rambling, imprecise, jargon-laden, evasive twaddle.

Gerry Adams speaks a language that strangers do not know and that non-strangers aren’t that good at understanding, either. That he got away with it for a decade is at least partly due to the aura of grimly determined heroism with which he wrapped himself.

“Here I am,” that aura said, “endangering myself by challenging my own hardliners, dragging the IRA kicking and screaming to the decommissioning dump, constantly thwarted by the David Trimbles of this world. I order you to feel my mandate. Close to the IRA? Moi?”

The other reason he got away with it was the continuous nature of the peace process. Instead of peace and its consequences, the peace process was vaguely chronic. This turned it into a disembodied artefact akin to a pot plant with fungus: it might die tomorrow or with constant Gerry Daly-type intensive care, it might go on forever.

Or you could think of it as being like EastEnders, going on and on forever with increasingly improbable plot shifts straining credulity. If Dirty Den could come back from the dead, Gerry Adams mightn’t be a member of the IRA...

Wrapping himself in heroism, verbal obscurity and the prosecution of progress verging on the infinite allowed Adams to subordinate the efforts of two governments and a rake of political parties to the Doughnut Syndrome, wherein the forcing of an electoral candidate (like Mary Lou McDonald) into footage of press conferences was the real priority.

MEDIA didn’t like the Doughnut Syndrome but didn’t know how to cope with it. Or with Adams, pre-bank heist. Media has NO problem coping with Adams, post-bank heist. All bets are off, all reverence abandoned. The pot plant is in the composter and Gerry Adams is in serious need of a makeover.

Indeed, given the level of political and media hostility he faces, he might start that makeover by nicking a HazMat suit from the gardaí (or, if he’s really against criminality, by borrowing one).

None of which should cause anyone to overlook the key lesson emerging from the American presidential election, which was that media hostility to a candidate or a political party can sometimes be totally out of kilter with the attitude of the voters.

The upcoming by-elections, particularly the one in Meath, will be the litmus test, identifying the line between what’s assumed to be the reaction on the ground to recent events and the reality of that reaction. The by-elections will be the first indicator of the damage, if any, to the Sinn Féin vote.

The core Sinn Féin voter, in the eyes of other political parties, is a malcontent who gets turned on by the smell of sulphur, gets seduced by workers on the ground who are not real volunteers but paid seducers fattened on the proceeds of bank robberies, and is attracted by the army discipline of SF. That core vote - assuming it exists - may not be deterred by recent revelations.

One school of thought holds that the scale and sophistication of the bank robbery would have delighted that core vote. The same school of thought would view refusal on Questions and Answers of a Sinn Féin speaker to describe the murder of a mother of 10 children as a crime as irrelevant to that core vote, a) because it wouldn’t be caught dead watching such a programme and b) because it buys the overarching concept of the republican movement as the ‘real” government, with the consequence that what the acting Government (the one in Leinster House) defines as a crime isn’t one.

Putting the core vote to one side, however, the fact is that the drift of traditional SDLP supporters in the North towards Sinn Féin in recent years has been subtly shadowed by a less obvious drift in the south. A volatile, moving sector of the electorate has tended to give Sinn Féin candidates a tick on the ballot paper as a mark against existing politicians, as a reward for the movement of republicans away from the bomb and the bullet, and encouragement for their involvement in the peace process.

The events of the past month and the blanket coverage of those events are likely to make that “soft” Sinn Féin potential voter feel gullible.

That said, Sinn Féin’s core vote will undoubtedly hold up because the core vote has already decided that all of what has happened is a conspiracy against the republican movement.

The real danger lies in the possibility that the IRA leadership might decide to play to that belief.