Hari and the Magician

In these less than troubled times I don’t make an effort to read interviews with Gerry Adams. Sinn Fein’s fall from republican grace no longer interests me to the extent that it once did and one Adams interview is pretty much the same as another. That I made a point of reading the one he did with Johann Hari for the Independent was more because of the interviewer rather than the interviewee. Hari has long been a powerful writer who, given to much reflection, often sees things through a prism that pulsates with insight.

From Adams’ perspective it was not a strong interview. It seems to be the way as of late. The eternal president has failed to cut the mustard since the debacle on RTE in the run up to the 2007 general election in the Republic. Not only that but he is persistently dragged beneath the surface of credibility by a self created albatross fashioned by his denials of IRA membership past or present. He comes across as instantly implausible, giving rise to suspicions that this lies behind his not having featured in the contentious hunger strike debate fuelled by the claims of Richard O’Rawe in his challenging book Blanketmen.

That said, he still managed to pull something out from his bag of tricks. Having negotiated such a small return for the great effort expended in the IRA’s armed struggle, Adams, chutzpah personified, made the remarkable comment that ‘this has been the only IRA campaign that has succeeded. Because every other one fought and then another generation had to pick up the fight, and continue fighting.’ A cynic might take the view that is only true to the extent that Sinn Fein will do its utmost to tout on any new generation inclined to take up the fight the Adams leadership abandoned.

The IRA campaign was an unmitigated failure, achieving only an internal solution, something the organisation pledged throughout its existence to thwart. Adams' point would be true if the IRA had fought for an internal solution rather than against it. But no amount of revisionism can alter the historical record which is out there for all and sundry to look at and judge for themselves.

In his interview Hari puts forward the thesis that Adams ‘decided to shift his goal: to aim for full equality for Catholics within a partitioned Ireland, and argue for reunification solely at the ballot box.’ It seems an accurate enough summation of the Adams position, the only problem being that Hari rather than Adams said it. Elsewhere Adams and his permanent leadership cabal have been consistent in claiming that there is something transitional about their acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement rather than the less dynamic stages theory outlined by Hari.

Even if we reject Hari’s static interpretation of the Sinn Fein project in favour of the more dynamic transitional properties ascribed to it by Adams, the whole ensemble in which Sinn Fein is currently enmeshed is undeniably reformist and fails to resemble republicanism as long articulated by the Provisional movement. Whatever its merits as a reformist strategy, as a republican project it falls abysmally short of its own stated goals and can hardly be held up as an outcome untainted by gross failure.

When it came to the matter of what else might be in his bag of tricks Adams looked less like he was pulling a rabbit from a hat and more like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The Sinn Fein leader handled the magician’s trick of making things disappear in a very clumsy fashion. While strenuously denying any involvement in the disappearance of Jean McConville he seemed ill at ease with Hari’s line of questioning.

When, a few years ago, Adams met two of her children, he told them: "Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared." But he wasn't. He was jailed more than six months later. Is she the body in his mental attic, the one he can't forget? … His usually long sentences begin to fracture … And he looks like he has run out of words. There is a long silence … He looks down, then away.

Forced to abandon an earlier claim that he had been in prison at the time of her disappearance, he knows that he could not maintain the falsehood and emerge as unscathed as he had from his recent ridiculous assertion in the face of irrefutable evidence that he had been singing in his jail cell ‘Look on the Bright Side of Life’ a year before the song was even released. Narrating demonstrable fictions around a war crime is a much more risky venture than narrating them around a song.

Culpable or not, his depiction by Hari reinforces the implausibility that has come to characterise his media performances. Undoubtedly heroic in the face of British abuses he remains confronted with the logic of Emerson that every hero becomes a bore at last. Even Harry Houdini would be hard pressed to devise an escape from the consequences of that.

Posted in: Irish Republicanism