‘Say Nothing’: Gerry Adams, Alleged IRA Commander, Dons Bulletproof Vest, Denies Ordering Bombings That Shook Britain

A civil lawsuit that began on Monday at London’s Royal Courts alleging that the Irish politician Gerry Adams was a member of the Irish Republican Army could establish as a matter of public record whether the 77 year-old Sinn Féin firebrand was also, as some would have it, a terrorist.Mr. Adams traveled to court donning a bullet proof vest, which he removed before entering the premises, which sits some 10 minutes from Trafalgar Square. He wore a pin expressing support for the Palestinian Arabs. Next week he will be cross-examined under oath, the first time he has ever answered questions in a British courtroom about his alleged participation in the violence, known as the Troubles, that convulsed Northern Ireland for three decades. Mr. Adams, hailed as a hero of peace by some and a murderer by others, is being sued for symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh, and Barry Laycock. The men were injured by attacks masterminded by the Provisional Irish Republican Army — the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, and the London Docklands and Manchester bombings in 1996.The IRA’s 1973 car bombing outside of the Old Bailey Courthouse was the first major attack in Britain since the Troubles began. Some 200 people were injured, and one civilian died of a heart attack. Two further bombs were found and defused. The Docklands truck bombing, outside of Canary Wharf, killed two people. The IRA warned that a bombing was imminent some 90 minutes before the explosion, but the area was not fully evacuated. The victims allege that Mr. Adams is “as culpable for the assaults giving rise to these claims as the individuals who planted and detonated the bombs. There is no doubt that the defendant contributed to the peace in Northern Ireland, but the claimants say that on the evidence he also contributed to the war.” The Provisional IRA, whose members were known informally as the “Provos,” was the dominant militant group fighting against British rule in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles,” the wave of ethno-nationalist violence that ran for some 30 years, from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brokered by President Clinton. Some 3,600 people died during the Troubles, with the majority of the deaths attributed to actions of Republican paramilitary groups like the IRA. Mr. Adams, who represented Louth in the Irish Dáil and West Belfast at Westminster, has always denied membership in the IRA. His lawyers discourage the court from finding “a senior political figure liable for exceptionally serious wrongdoing” on the basis of “multiple and predominantly anonymous hearsay evidence, in the context of a deeply partisan conflict which has spawned countless personal and political grievances, schisms and animi.”The claimants insist that Mr. Adams had a “foot in each camp,” meaning that he was both a political actor and an avatar of armed resistance. In the Irish context this was called the “two-strand attack,” where the Republicans pursued their struggle against Britain through both paramilitary violence, courtesy of the IRA, and the ballot box, where Sinn Féin, a political party, stood for the vote. Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price in ‘Say Nothing.’ Rob Youngson/FXMr. Adams is accused of being an “instrumental force” in formulating this approach, which goes by the shorthand “ArmaLite” — after the American rifle manufacturer — “and ballot box.” The plaintiffs allege not only that Mr. Adams was a member of the IRA, but that he sat on its war council and directed the bombings in the 1990s “in furtherance of a common design to bomb the British mainland.”Allegations that Mr. Adams was in the van of the IRA have dogged him for years. In 2014 he was briefly detained by the Police Service of Northern Ireland in connection with the 1972 abduction and murder by the IRA of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was suspected of passing information to the British. That incident became the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe’s non-fiction chronicle of the Troubles, “Say Nothing,” and its FX adaptation.The title of Mr. Radden Keefe’s book comes from a poem about the Troubles written by the Nobel Prize-winning Seamus Heaney — “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.” The final line of the poem asks “Is there a life before death?/That’s chalked up In Ballymurphy.” That is the district of Belfast where Mr. Adams was born. In 1971, the British Army killed 11 civilians there. A 2021 found those murders to have been “without justification. The event is known as “Belfast’s Bloody Sunday.” A key figure in Mr. Radden-Keefe’s account, Dolours Price, along with her sister Marian, was a member of the IRA unit that launched the first car-bomb attacks on London in 1973 — the Old Bailey attack that is at the center of this civil case against Mr. Adams. She was sentenced to life in prison but served seven years and was released following a hunger strike. Price, like Mr. Adams, a Catholic from West Belfast, also admitted to involvement in the murder of McConville.Price’s testimony is likely to be introduced into evidence at this trial. Before her death in 2013 she was a fierce critic of Mr. Adams, who she alleges was her commander in the IRA. She told the Britain’s Sunday Telegraph in 2012 in respect of the Old Bailey bombing that “Adams started talking and said it was a big, dangerous operation. He said: ‘This could be a hanging job. If anyone doesn’t want to go to London they should up and leave now through the back door.’” In 2015 King Charles III — then the Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne — shook Mr. Adams’s hand during a royal visit to Galway. In 1983, Mr. Adams threatened to sue the Irish Times for the “monstrous libel” of describing him as “Provisional IRA vice-president” instead of “Provisional Sinn Féin vice-president.” Last year he won a defamation case against the BBC, to the tune of 100,000 pounds, over allegations that he ordered the murder of an IRA informant. The Irish Times relates that Mr. Adams, while looking “inscrutable,” also appeared to “raise an eyebrow at some of the ambitious attempts at pronunciation of Irish language names” by the British court. Particularly troublesome were the names of the IRA in Irish, Óglaigh na hÉireann, and the republican newspaper An Phoblacht. A column in that paper, written in the 1970’s with the byline “Brownie” — widely believed to be Mr. Adams — declared “Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer and, rightly or wrongly, I take a course of action as a means to bringing about a situation in which I believe the people of my country will prosper.”

‘Say Nothing’: Gerry Adams, Alleged IRA Commander, Dons Bulletproof Vest, Denies Ordering Bombings That Shook Britain

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