Gerry Adams, Denounced as ‘One of Ireland’s Most Notorious Serial Killers,’ Defeats Latest Bid To Tie Him to IRA

The withdrawal of a civil case alleging that the Irish politician Gerry Adams was a leader of the Irish Republican Army and one of the authors of the spasm of violence known as the Troubles means that Mr. Adams’s denials are definitive — for now.The case was brought by three men who were injured in bombings carried out in Britain in the 1970s and 1990s by the IRA. The paramilitary group sought to end London’s rule over the six counties of Northern Ireland, and was opposed by largely Protestant forces loyal to the Crown. Some 3,600 people were killed over three decades, mostly at Belfast and its environs. The claimants were suing for a symbolic single pound — what they sought was an acknowledgment that Mr. Adams ordered the bombings as a senior IRA commander. The Belfast-born Mr. Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA. The case, though, alleged that he directed violence as a militant while also serving as a politician with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA.Now the case has, somewhat mysteriously, been “discontinued.” An attorney for the court says that the withdrawal is “related” to an argument around “abuse of process.” The claimants sought to make a public statement in court explaining why they pulled back, but the judge ruled that against providing “an opportunity for a public statement.”Mr. Adams declared in a statement following the withdrawal that the case ought “never have been brought” and that he defended himself “against the smears and false accusations being levelled against me. I asserted the legitimacy of the Republican cause and the right of the people of Ireland to freedom and self-determination. I do so again.”The case was brought by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh, and Barry Laycock, who crowdsourced some 100,000 pounds in legal fees to bring a case alleging that Mr. Adams was responsible for the IRA’s Old Bailey attack in 1973, and the London Docklands and Manchester bombings in 1996. Mr. Adams led the Sinn Féin delegation during peace talks that eventually brought an end to the Troubles with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.Mr. Adams led Sinn Féin between 1983 and 2018. Despite being elected as a Member of Parliament in his native west Belfast from 1997 until 2011, he, per a party practice known as “abstentionism,” refused to take his seat in Westminster. In 1978 Mr. Adams was charged with being a member of the IRA, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Mr. Adams was further questioned about those affiliations at a 2019 inquest into the murder in 1971 of 11 civilians by the British Army at the Ballymurphy neighborhood of Belfast, from where Mr. Adams hails. A coroner’s report in 2021 found that those killings were “without justification.” Last year Mr. Adams was awarded 100,000 pounds in a libel case he brought against the BBC for an article where an unnamed source accused him of ordering a murder in 2006. The network reckons that it was “one of the most expensive cases the corporation has ever fought,” with legal bills running between 3 million and 5 million pounds.Mr. Adams claims “no involvement whatsoever” with the bombings and denies that he was ever a member of the IRA, despite testimony to the contrary from, among others, Dolours Price, who as a young woman executed the Old Bailey bombing at issue in this case. A former IRA member, Shane Paul O’Doherty, testified that Mr. Adams acted as “commander-in-chief” of the IRA during a campaign of “atrocities.”Mr. O’Doherty also told the United Kingdom High Court that Mr. Adams was “one of Ireland’s most prolific serial killers.” A former intelligence officer with the British Army, Richard Kemp, called it “inconceivable” that Mr. Adams would have been ignorant of the bombings at the center of this case. Mr. Adams claimed in court that the claims amounted to “an assortment of hearsay evidence.” One of the claimants, Mr. Laycock, declares in a statement after the “I’m completely devastated. The fair trial we sought, getting Mr Adams into the dock for the first time, was achieved. But somehow we have lost our protection. How is that fair on me or all the victims who deserve justice?”

Gerry Adams, Denounced as ‘One of Ireland’s Most Notorious Serial Killers,’ Defeats Latest Bid To Tie Him to IRA

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