Such contradictions may simply have been a matter of expediency. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, which had long nurtured a grudge against the man they perceived to be an architect of IRA violence, would not hesitate to arrest Adams if he admitted to his membership of the group. In fact, the British government had endeavoured to prosecute Adams on a so-called membership charge in 1978, based on language he had used that seemed to acknowledge his role in the IRA. But he fought the charges, and the case was dismissed. ‘In a society where an organisation like the Provisional IRA is illegal and its political wing legal, activists like Gerry Adams have an enigmatic role to play,’ observed a 1982 feature on Adams in The Irish People, a newspaper published by republican sympathisers in New York, adding that Adams ‘plays his part very adroitly’. Adams appeared in a photograph wearing a turtleneck sweater and expressed great indignation, in an interview, about his treatment by the press. He was often asked ‘loaded questions’ about whether he ‘continued’ to condone violence, he said, adding, ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with it.’ Queried by The Irish People about whether he would justify Bloody Friday, the operation that Brendan Hughes oversaw in which bombs exploded all over civilian areas in Belfast, Adams responded, ‘I would certainly not attempt to justify any action in which civilians are killed. I naturally regret very much all such deaths.’ But, he continued, ‘since it is not the policy of the IRA to kill civilians, I could not, by the same token, condemn them for accidental killings’.
Such calibrated sophistry became another Adams signature, always delivered with unwavering certainty, in his unflustered brogue, and many Adams critics came to loathe his caveated expressions of ‘regret’. But Adams insisted that when it came to a moral accounting of violence, the IRA should be held to the same standard as the British state. ‘In any war situation, civilians unfortunately suffer and die,’ he pointed out. ‘The presence of the gun in Irish politics is not the sole responsibility of the Irish. The British were responsible for putting it there in the first place and they continue to use it to stay in Ireland.’ He added, ‘No amount of voting papers alone will get them out.’
Adams had always been deeply enmeshed in his community, and as MP for West Belfast he demonstrated a surprising avidity for the quotidian busywork of local politics. Loping down the little streets, trailed by curious schoolchildren and loyal aides, he would go door-to-door, murmuring empathetically at his constituents’ complaints about litter or their quarrels with the Housing Executive. ‘Brian’ll phone them in the morning and then he’ll nip round here to see what’s happened, won’t you Brian?’ he would assure them as Brian or some other aide dutifully scribbled details in a notebook.
With his smart blazers, carefully trimmed beard and ever-present pipe, Adams had acquired the air of a hip, if slightly pompous, public intellectual. He published a book of gauzy remembrances about his childhood in the Falls. He stroked his beard. He appointed a press aide.
Gerry Adams, politician (Jacqueline Arzt/AP/REX/Shutterstock)
Sinn Féin began to open ‘advice centres’, which could counsel constituents on prosaic matters like welfare claims. There was something slightly comical about this self-conscious metamorphosis from revolutionary cadre to retail political outfit: at one point, Sinn Féin determined, with great fanfare, that it no longer condoned ‘kneecapping’ as a means of disciplining young people for antisocial behaviour. The former Derry gunman Martin McGuinness, who had won a seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections in 1982, solemnly announced that, ‘after some discussion, the IRA decided that shooting a young lad in the leg, leaving him crippled for life, is not a just and fair punishment’. Instead, McGuinness continued, ‘we want to take a more socially involved, preventative approach’. Some nationalists from the SDLP likened Sinn Féin’s abrupt rebranding as a well-meaning troupe of community activists to the Virgin Birth.
Adams now maintained that he had never personally ordered or participated in any violence, but he would not renounce violent techniques. In his first address after being elected president of Sinn Féin, he made it clear that violence should continue – in tandem with political activity. Indeed, even as Adams began to contemplate, and then act upon, a scheme to bring an end to the conflict, the IRA carried out more deadly operations. Just before Christmas in 1983, the Provos detonated a bomb at Harrods in London, killing five people and injuring ninety. (Adams said that the bomb ‘had not gone right’.) The following October, a volunteer placed a time bomb in a room at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet would be staying during the Conservative Party conference. The bomb exploded, killing five people, but not Thatcher. The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’
Adams defended the Brighton bombing as not merely justifiable but necessary. The fatalities, he said, ‘are sad symptoms of the British presence in this country’. The bombing was not a blow against democracy, as some had charged. It was actually ‘a blow for democracy’. Thatcher may have survived the attack, but she was shaken. Privately, she became convinced that the Provos would eventually succeed. ‘They’ll probably get me in the end,’ she would say. ‘But I don’t like to hand myself to them on a plate.’
Adams shared with his nemesis a conviction that the conflict might kill him. After an arrest in 1983, when the RUC tried to stop a Sinn Féin motorcade from displaying tricolour flags, Adams was put on trial in Belfast in the spring of 1984. The MP for West Belfast faced charges of disorderly behaviour and obstruction of the police. One day, during a lunch break from the proceedings, he left the Magistrates Court and climbed into a car with some associates for the short ride back to West Belfast. After years on the run, Adams tended to deliberately make his movements difficult to predict. But his trial was a major news story, and it was widely known that he would be at court in the centre of Belfast that day. He had grown so fearful about his own safety that he had applied for a licence to carry a firearm for self-defence. But the request had been rejected, to nobody’s surprise, by the RUC. Adams had taken to predicting his own death, saying, ‘I think there is a 90 per cent chance I may be assassinated.’
Not long after the car left the court, it slowed in traffic on Howard Street, and a brown vehicle appeared, pulling alongside it. Two gunmen fired a dozen shots at Adams and his associates. Adams was hit three times, in the neck, shoulder and arm, but not killed. (Three others in the car were also wounded, but none of them died.) ‘Christ said that those that take the sword shall perish by the sword,’ the Reverend Ian Paisley declared upon hearing of the shooting. ‘I have followed too many coffins over which Gerry Adams has rejoiced to feel any pain and sorrow over what has taken place today.’
The gunmen were quickly apprehended, and identified as members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters. But from his bed at Royal Victoria Hospital, Adams claimed that the authorities had known about the attack in advance and had hoped it would succeed. It was indicative of Adams’s continued status as a political outcast that none of his fellow members of the British Parliament issued any expressions of sympathy or condemnation following this assassination attempt. They greeted the news of the shooting with glacial silence.
19
Blue Ribbons
When Brendan Hughes was finally released from Long Kesh in 1986, after nearly thirteen years, he went to live, initially, with Gerry Adams and his family in West Belfast. Hughes’s marriage had foundered while he was inside. He learned from a fellow prisoner that Lily had become involved with another man. ‘I called her to the jail and told her there was no problem,’ he later recalled. ‘She was young and deserved a bit of happiness. She always said the war was my number one priority and she was right. I was selfish. I neglected my family.’ When he got out of prison, Hughes went to Lily’s house and shook her new partner’s hand.
After so many years behind bars, he was puzzled by the city
he had returned to. Everything seemed different. Sometimes Hughes would go for a walk only to discover, as if in a dream, that the old streets he remembered were gone, and new, different streets had taken their place. Once, he got lost in his own neighbourhood and a stranger had to guide him home. Prison life had a comforting, if monotonous, predictability. By contrast, Belfast seemed noisy, jarring, unsafe. Hughes found that he was uncomfortable in large crowds. He would venture out to the pub only in the afternoon, when it was quiet.
Hughes could sense that Adams was manoeuvring politically, though he had no inkling of the nascent peace process. He still thought of himself as a soldier, and Adams, who had always been political, was now an actual politician. There were places in Belfast where hard men congregated, and Hughes could go and sit and be accepted among such men, but Adams could not, because even before his rote denials of IRA membership, he had never been perceived as much of a soldier. Even so, Hughes and Adams had always been a team, and Hughes maintained a deep sense of loyalty to his comrade. If Adams’s lack of combat bona fides amounted to a liability, then Hughes hoped that his own reputation would buttress his friend’s, and he could serve Adams as ‘his physical force arm within the movement’. If Adams was the draughtsman, then Hughes would be his instrument. He may not have fully appreciated just how useful it was to Adams for the two of them to be seen together as he accompanied Adams around the country, helping to secure the electoral base for Sinn Féin. This way, Adams could keep repeating that he was not a member of the IRA, but to anyone with eyes in their head, the value of such a bromide would be subtly counteracted by the presence, at his elbow, of the ferocious, moustachioed Brendan Hughes.
Hughes was keenly aware of the ways in which his role as a republican icon – Darkie Hughes, Hunger Striker – might be put to use as a political commodity. After his release, he agreed to make a trip to America, in an effort to raise morale and financial support for the armed campaign. There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself. This demographic anomaly was a testament to centuries of migration caused by poverty, famine and discrimination, and there was strong support for the cause of Irish independence among the Irish in America. Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one’s own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocer’s shop. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the ‘plastic Paddies’ who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America. But the IRA had long counted on the United States as a source of support. Indeed, it was from America that Brendan Hughes had first procured the Armalite rifle years earlier.
Hughes travelled to New York and met representatives from the Irish Northern Aid Committee, or ‘Noraid’, a fund-raising group. At one meeting, an opinionated Irish American benefactor informed Hughes that the Provos were going about the war all wrong. What you should really be doing, the man told him, is widening your range of targets. Start shooting anyone who is in any way associated with the British regime – anyone who wears the crown on his uniform.
‘Postmen?’ Hughes interjected. ‘Shoot postmen?’
Of course you should be shooting postmen, the man replied.
‘Right,’ Hughes said. ‘I’m going back to Belfast in a couple of weeks … We’ll get another ticket and you come back with me and you shoot the fucking postmen.’
The man presented Hughes with a suitcase full of money for the cause. But the more they conversed, the more objectionable Hughes found his politics. Hughes still regarded himself as a revolutionary socialist, but he was discovering that among the conservative Irish Americans who supported the IRA during the 1980s, socialism was not exactly in vogue. Finally, in a fit of pique, Hughes blurted, ‘I don’t want your fucking money!’ So the man left and took his suitcase with him.
After his release from prison, Hughes had returned directly to active service with the IRA. He travelled around on both sides of the border, planning operations. But as he interacted, on these missions, with frontline volunteers, he was struck by a feeling of unease in some quarters, a lurking sense that the IRA might have become too political. At times, Hughes wondered whether, as a pure soldier, he had been overtaken by history and grown outmoded. On a visit to Dublin, he went to Sinn Féin headquarters on Parnell Square. The place was abuzz with above-board political activity. But as Hughes glanced around, he could not escape the sensation that he had no role to play in this new tableau – that he was not really a part of it. He paid a visit to Seamus Twomey, the former chief of staff of the IRA, who had been sprung from Mountjoy Prison in a helicopter back in 1973. Twomey was three decades older than Hughes. He had been sidelined, squeezed out of the IRA’s Army Council by Gerry Adams and the people around him, and Hughes found him living alone in a small Dublin flat. The place, Hughes noted, was quite run down. This was a man who had spent his whole adult life in the IRA. It occurred to Hughes, when he beheld the meagre circumstances in which Twomey would spend his final years, that there wasn’t much of a pension plan for the movement. When Twomey died, a few years later, Hughes drove his coffin from Dublin back to Belfast. Apart from Twomey’s wife, there was nobody to greet the coffin when it got there.
A few days after New Year in 1989, Dolours Price and Stephen Rea had a baby, a little boy named Fintan Daniel Sugar (‘to be known as “Danny’,’’ the birth announcement said). Just over a year later, they had a second son, Oscar, who was named after Oscar Wilde. ‘The poor fella looks like me (I think) but he may grow out of that,’ Price noted in a letter to a friend, adding, ‘Know any babysitters?’ She was besotted with her children, ‘cracked about them’, Rea said. Seamus Heaney composed an original poem for the boys. He wrote it on a Japanese fan, which the couple hung on the wall in their home. (It has never been published.) In prison, Price had feared that she might never have a child, but now here she was, getting a chance at something like a normal life. The family lived in London but continued to keep a home in Belfast. ‘I want them to have an Irish childhood, to grow up with Irish accents,’ Stephen Rea said of his sons. ‘I’d find it kind of phony to bring up two English kids.’
Price was still working on her autobiography and talking, periodically, with various publishers. But, as Rea explained in one interview, ‘It’s never the right time to publish.’ Price had retreated from politics. Yet her husband maintained an unusual connection to her old commanding officer, Gerry Adams. When he emerged as a presence on the international scene, Adams had become a hate figure in England. With his unnerving calm and his baritone erudition, he was a deeply polarising and palpably dangerous figure: a righteous, charismatic, eloquent apologist for terrorism. Fearful, perhaps, of his powers of ideological seduction, the Thatcher government imposed a peculiar restriction, ‘banning’ the IRA and Sinn Féin from the airwaves. What this meant in practice was that when Adams appeared on television, British broadcasters were prevented, by law, from transmitting the sound of his voice. His image could be shown, and the content of his speech could be conveyed, but his voice could not be heard. So broadcasters devised a work-around that was practical, if also slightly ridiculous: when Adams appeared on television, an actor would dub his voice. The face was recognisably Adams, and the words were his words, but the voice saying them would belong to somebody else.
A handful of Irish actors provided voice-overs for the Sinn Féin president; Adams was in the press with sufficient frequency that there was plenty of work to go round. One of the actors was Stephen Rea. ‘There was nothing to stop us employing the best actor we could find,’ one news producer said in 1990 when asked about Rea, adding, ‘We’re not interested in who he’s married to. Anyway, I think he’s Protestant.’ For his part, Rea explained the decision to serve as a surrogate for Adams not as an expression of any particular ideological affinity, but as a reaction against censorship. Whatever people th
ought of Adams, they should at least hear what the man had to say, Rea argued: ‘The problems will never be solved unless we are allowed to know what all the elements are.’
As Rea’s acting career continued to flourish, he still balked at questions about Price or her past. But he did not shy away, in his work, from the subject of the Troubles. In 1992, Rea achieved a new level of international renown when he starred in the film The Crying Game, directed by a close collaborator of his, Neil Jordan. Rea’s character in the film is an IRA gunman, Fergus, who is given the task of guarding a doomed prisoner – a British soldier, played by Forest Whitaker. Over several days, the guard and his captive develop a relationship, to the point that, when the time comes for Fergus to pull the trigger, he finds himself unable to do so. The scenario eerily evoked the dirty work that Dolours Price had done for the Unknowns two decades earlier: crying behind the wheel as she chaperoned her friend Joe Lynskey to his death; taking Kevin McKee to the house in County Monaghan, where his captors grew so fond of him that they refused to shoot him and another team of gunmen had to be summoned from Belfast to do it.
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