Departure of Adams will have to be both staggered and stage managed

PUBLIC anger about Gerry Adams’s past, prompted by the RTÉ documentary The Disappeared, and his alleged inaction over his brother’s crimes of child sex abuse is probably trumped by public apathy.

In any event the public furore is emphatically neither shared nor spreading within Sinn Féin. Gerry Adams’s departure is not imminent. What perplexes Sinn Féin members far more than their leader’s past, is their own future.

Adams’s past is both his achievement and his achilles heel. Those, and they remain the great majority in the Republic, who cannot countenance Sinn Féin, revile the paramilitarism that gave Adams his original political base and subsequent status as a peacemaker. If many grudgingly give him some credit for the latter they will never forgive him for the former. The problem, however, for those whose project is the containment of Sinn Féin is that time has out-marched them. The genie is out of the bottle.