Adams had plenty of notice that the authorities wanted to take him into custody. Since 2011, he had been a legislator in the Republic of Ireland, so he enjoyed certain courtesies. The police had contacted him in advance, through his lawyers, and asked him to come to a PSNI station in Antrim. Adams insisted that he would come of his own accord and that they could arrest him inside the barracks: he was, by this stage, an emeritus professor of political optics, and he wanted to deny the police the opportunity to arrest him outside the station, in the car park, where a gaggle of press photographers, tipped off in advance, could snap a photograph of him in handcuffs. Just after eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, 30 April, Adams glided into the station. His belt, watch and tie were removed, and he was escorted into a room where two officers, a man and a woman, proceeded to inundate him with questions.
Given how frequently Adams had been questioned about the fate of the disappeared, you might suppose that he would have a selection of burnished defences at the ready. But the answers that he tended to put forth in these situations were never particularly compelling. Questioned about the oral histories of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, Adams tended to repeat his assertion that, because they were aggrieved opponents of the peace process, their accounts must be dismissed in their entirety. He wasn’t wrong in suggesting that Hughes and Price nursed grudges. Price herself had once acknowledged that she had given the interviews to Boston College ‘for a kind of score settling reason’. But Adams never seemed to be able to account for how it was that Hughes and Price had independently come up with stories about him that were so identical in their particulars.
Yes, they resented Adams, and yes, they had demons, and yes, they were bitter, and yes, that was probably why they put their accusations on the record, Eamonn McCann wrote in the Irish Times. ‘But he isn’t obviously right in suggesting that these feelings caused them to concoct wicked lies to discredit him. It is at least as likely that they broke the IRA’s code of secrecy because they believed it had been rendered meaningless by the strategy adopted by Adams and his close associates.’ McCann concluded that ‘what they’d been driven to do was not to tell lies but to tell the truth’. As Price herself said, ‘I wanted very much to put Gerry Adams where he belonged – and where he had been.’
On the particular question of the disappeared, Adams tended to feign a level of ignorance that was difficult to reconcile with the role he had played in Belfast at the dawn of the Troubles. Joe Lynskey was ‘a neighbour of mine. He lived across the street,’ Adams had acknowledged. Yet he had no memory of asking any questions when Lynskey abruptly disappeared. There were ‘numerous rumours over the last forty years’, Adams told the Irish News, noting that there had supposedly been sightings of Lynskey in Birmingham, Manchester and Australia. How was Adams to know that the IRA had murdered him and buried him in an unmarked grave?
When a Belfast investigative journalist named Darragh MacIntyre questioned him about Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, the informants who were disappeared after the Four Square Laundry operation, Adams claimed to have known nothing about the IRA’s decision to kill them, either. But in his own memoir, Adams had written glowingly about the IRA’s discovery of the Four Square Laundry, MacIntyre pointed out. How could he have known about that yet not known that the Provos discovered the operation only after Wright and McKee confessed to being double agents? Adams could offer no coherent answer. MacIntyre pressed: You weren’t at all curious about the fate of these two young men?
‘I learned a long time ago,’ Adams replied, ‘if you don’t ask, you can’t tell.’
Dating as far back, perhaps, as his own childhood, Adams had excelled at the fraught art of wilful denial. In 2009, a woman named Áine Tyrrell, who was Adams’s niece, the daughter of his brother Liam, revealed on a news programme that her father had raped her during her childhood and molested her for almost a decade, beginning when she was four years old. In an interview on the programme, Gerry Adams admitted that he had known about Áine’s allegations – and believed them – for twenty-two years. Yet he had never approached the police. In fact, Liam Adams became an active member of Sinn Féin, one who specialised in working with young people. He ended up getting a job counselling local children at a youth centre in Gerry’s own Belfast constituency. Gerry would subsequently claim that he had intervened to persuade Liam that this might not be the best environment for him. But by the time he did so, Liam had been in the job for more than a year.
Reeling from the exposure that he had long known his brother was a monster, Adams offered a revelation of his own: their father, Gerry Sr., had been a predator as well, who ‘emotionally, physically and sexually’ abused members of the family. Adams said that he had not been abused himself, and he would not specify which of his nine siblings had been victimised in this way. He maintained, moreover, that he had not known about the abuse until he was an adult. Adams acknowledged that there was a ‘culture of concealment’ in Irish life regarding the issue of sexual predation. But he was going public now, he said, to help ‘other families who are in the same predicament’.
On the one hand, this was an astounding turn, and a window into how Adams became the cipher that he did: here was a man who had grown up in a penumbral world of secrets and who had cultivated the quick and unsentimental reflexes of a survivalist. At the same time, some observers detected in this jarring announcement the deft hand of public relations. Áine Tyrrell would later allege that her uncle, whom she called ‘the Beard’, had urged her not to go public and had done everything in his power to prevent the revelations about Liam from coming out. When he came forward with his own story of growing up in an abusive household, Adams was breaking, belatedly, a code of silence that had allowed abuse to flourish. But why come forward with the story of his father now, days after the exposure of his brother? As one political journalist in Belfast noted, ‘He must have known, and been advised by his media handlers, that it could move the story on from Liam.’ Adams possessed an uncanny grasp of the metabolism of the news media. The new story ‘would provide a follow-up, give things a new twist’, perhaps even ‘attract sympathy for Adams’.
When he was asked about the disappeared, Adams always flatly denied knowing anything about the decision making behind this controversial tactic. But it would have been a decision: even in the antic, bloody days of late 1972, the Provos were an assiduously hierarchical organisation in which one didn’t go about executing people, much less disappearing them, without authorisation from the brass. Dumping bodies in unmarked graves was not an accident. It was a policy. Dolours Price told Ed Moloney that the decision to disappear someone was made by the Belfast Brigade. The brigade staff ‘would have had to sit and thrash it out’, she said. And Gerry Adams was the brigade commander.
In the police station at Antrim, the officers asked Adams about the Boston College interviews. Presumably, they walked through the statements by Price and Hughes and others and spelled out what they knew about the structure of the Belfast Brigade. But Adams had a simple, implacable answer to all that. There was just one problem with their theory: he could not have been the commanding officer of the Belfast Brigade in 1972, because he never joined the IRA in the first place. Describing his own theory of how best to survive under interrogation, Adams had once recalled the time he was arrested as a young man and questioned before being locked up on the Maidstone. That was the interview in which he stubbornly insisted that his name was not Gerry Adams. The whole pretence had been an obvious charade, he conceded later, but it was also ‘a crutch to withstand their inquisition’. To remain silent was the best policy, he had decided as a young man. ‘So even though they knew who I was, it was irrelevant. I couldn’t answer their questions, on the basis that I wasn’t who they said I was.’
In some other political party, in some other place, the arrest of a politician in a cold-case investigation involving the notorious murder and secret burial of a widowed mother of ten would more than likely mean the swift end of a political c
areer. But Gerry Adams was a special case. Even as Sinn Féin had thrived as a political party, not just in Northern Ireland but in the Republic, and achieved stature and influence beyond the most ambitious imaginings of its leaders, the party’s fortunes still seemed tied, inextricably, to those of its charismatic president. Sinn Féin had plenty of young, polished representatives who, having grown up after the worst of the Troubles were over, bore no compromising taint of paramilitary violence. This new cohort did not lack ambition. But they were unwilling, or unable, to shuffle the old men of the IRA off the stage. When it emerged that Adams had effectively covered for his paedophile brother, nobody in his party breathed a word, in public, that was less than supportive. Sinn Féin still retained an unmatched capacity to project the appearance of a unified front, and the leadership now argued that the arrest of Gerry Adams was nothing short of an attack on the party itself.
Overnight, a team of artists painted a new mural on the Falls Road, depicting a smiling Adams alongside the words PEACEMAKER, LEADER, VISIONARY. At a rally to unveil the mural, Martin McGuinness announced that the arrest was ‘politically biased’. He cited local government and EU elections in the coming weeks and suggested that the timing of Adams’s humiliation was designed to hurt Sinn Féin’s electoral prospects. McGuinness blamed ‘an embittered rump of the old RUC’ that still persisted within the police department and was now out to ‘settle old scores whatever the political cost’. With Divis Tower visible in the distance, hundreds of supporters milled around, holding placards that read DEFEND THE PEACE PROCESS, RELEASE GERRY ADAMS, above a photo of Adams alongside Nelson Mandela.
While McGuinness delivered his remarks, a great bear of a man stood at his elbow. The man had close-cropped grey hair, a high forehead and a knitted brow, and he stood chewing gum, holding the script from which McGuinness was reading. It was Bobby Storey, the IRA enforcer who was known affectionately in republican circles as Big Bobby. Given all the rhetoric about how Gerry Adams was getting antagonised for being such a peacemaker, Big Bobby was a discordant presence at the occasion. He had joined the IRA as a teenager, in the early 1970s, and ultimately served twenty years in prison. After the peace process he had become the chair of Sinn Féin in Belfast, but he was often described as the IRA’s top spymaster. In fact, he was reputed to have been the architect of the break-in at the Castlereagh barracks, in 2002. Storey was also widely believed to have been involved in the Northern Bank robbery, in which thieves made off with twenty-six million pounds. It was the largest bank robbery in the history of the United Kingdom at the time. And it was the timing that proved most significant: the bank was robbed in December 2004, years after the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA no longer needed money to buy weapons. In fact, at the time the robbery happened, the group was giving up its weapons; the decommissioning process overseen by Father Reid was at that point almost complete. For critics of Sinn Féin, the robbery solidified the impression that the IRA had morphed into a mafia organisation. ‘Call me old fashioned if you like, but there used to be standards,’ Dolours Price wrote in the aftermath of the robbery. ‘The War is over, we are told … so what is all this money needed for?’
Big Bobby was a close confidant of Adams’s. But he had the mien of a thug. Standing in front of the mural, he took the microphone and bellowed about the arrogance that might prompt authorities to ‘dare touch our party leader’. His indignation rising, Storey shouted, ‘We have a message for the British government, the Irish government, for the cabal that’s out there.’ Then he said, ‘We ain’t gone away, you know.’
To anyone in Belfast who heard those words, the echo was unmistakable. Storey was quoting, quite intentionally, one of the most famous sound bites of the Troubles: the moment, nineteen years earlier, when Adams was interrupted during a speech by a heckler who shouted, ‘Bring back the IRA!’ and Adams responded, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’ Hearing those words from Big Bobby, Michael McConville felt a chill. The McConville children had been pushing to get access to the Boston College tapes, and had felt gratified by the arrest of Gerry Adams. Yet here was what seemed like an unambiguous threat.
Mackers, too, saw pure menace in the remark. ‘He didn’t mean Sinn Féin hadn’t gone away,’ he said. ‘He meant the IRA.’ To the people who had participated in the Belfast Project, the message was clear. ‘I don’t even care about Sinn Féin and the political process. I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck,’ Ricky O’Rawe said. ‘All I care about is the truth.’ Yet Storey was informing those who might dare to tell their tales that they had crossed not only Gerry Adams, but the IRA. To O’Rawe, the city suddenly felt unsafe. The IRA itself wouldn’t necessarily need to sanction some action against him. With rhetoric like Storey’s, it could be some kid, heeding the call to arms, looking to please the leadership, itching to earn his spurs.
Belfast graffiti (Peter Morrison/AP/REX/Shutterstock)
A new epithet, BOSTON COLLEGE TOUTS, began to appear in graffiti on buildings around Belfast. In an article titled ‘The Boston Time Bomb’, Sunday World described the ‘state of panic’ in republican circles about the Belfast Project, and outed a number of additional individuals who had purportedly given interviews to Anthony McIntyre. ‘Mackers has managed to do what countless RUC men failed to do, he has turned good people into touts,’ one former IRA figure told the paper. Mackers had instructed his children that they should no longer answer any knock at the door, and had taken to checking beneath his car for signs of an explosive device.
‘There was a sustained, malicious, untruthful and sinister campaign alleging involvement by me in the killing of Jean McConville,’ Adams declared when he was released after four days of questioning. ‘I am innocent of any involvement in the abduction, killing, or burial of Mrs McConville.’ At a press conference, he denounced the allegations against him as a ‘sham’ and challenged Ed Moloney to explain why he had done the follow-up interview with Dolours Price in 2010. ‘It is that interview,’ along with the Brendan Hughes and Ivor Bell interviews, ‘which formed the mainstay for my arrest,’ Adams said. It was important to focus on the future now and not the past, he stressed. ‘The IRA is gone,’ Adams insisted, somewhat less than convincingly, in light of Storey’s comments. ‘It’s finished.’
After releasing Adams, the PSNI forwarded a file on him to the Public Prosecution Service, which would now determine whether enough evidence existed to bring murder charges against him. It looked as though Adams might be in very real jeopardy – a development that, it seems fair to say, Dolours Price would surely have appreciated.
But by that time, Price was dead. She had been well aware of the court battle in the United States over her Boston College interview, though she claimed to be indifferent to it. ‘I have put that away to the back of my head,’ she said in the summer of 2012. ‘I will not lose a night’s sleep over it.’ Her drinking intensified, however, as did her depression. The following January she was briefly hospitalised after falling, drunk, down a flight of stairs. She discharged herself, went back to her house in Malahide, and continued to drink and to take Valium. On the day she died, her son Danny checked in on her before he left the house in the morning and found her in bed, asleep. When he came back that evening, she had not moved. ‘She wasn’t breathing,’ he said later. ‘I knew straight away that she was dead.’ A postmortem discovered a toxic combination of antidepressants, sedatives and antipsychotics in her bloodstream. (There was no alcohol in her system at the time she died.) She was sixty-two.
In 1975, when the Price sisters petitioned for compassionate leave from prison to bury their mother, permission was denied. But in 2013, the authorities allowed Marian to leave prison for a few hours so that she could attend the wake of her sister in the family home on Slievegallion Drive. The following day, black flags hung from the lamp posts lining Andersonstown Road as Stephen Rea and his sons carried the coffin through a cold rain and into St Agnes’s Church, trailed by a long cortège.
A bespectacled priest with a wreath of white
hair said the requiem Mass. He was Monsignor Raymond Murray, who had been the chaplain at Armagh jail when Dolours and Marian were prisoners there and had married Dolours and Stephen in the secret ceremony at the Armagh cathedral, in 1983. ‘In a strange way, she lived up to her name, Dolours,’ Murray said. ‘A baptismal name given to her no doubt in devotional memory of Our Lady of Sorrows.’ He recalled her early years as a student protester and the lifelong toll of her hunger strike. Her old friend and co-defendant Hugh Feeney was at the Mass. He pointed out that forty years earlier, he and Gerry Kelly had been on hunger strike along with Dolours and Marian. Now Dolours was being buried, Feeney was at her funeral, Marian was back in prison, and Gerry Kelly was in politics. Kelly, who had become a Sinn Féin politician and had long since fallen out with Price, did not attend the funeral. Nor did Price’s old commanding officer, Gerry Adams.
Outside, the rain came pouring down. It was a dismal, windswept Belfast winter day, and as the mourners left the church and began the trudge to Milltown Cemetery, hundreds of black umbrellas popped open. The coffin was wrapped in a bright tricolour flag, and for a moment it seemed to float, borne along on that dark tide, like a raft on an unquiet sea.
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