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GERRY ADAMS: Sammy and Boris are left sizzling with rage

LAST week was not a good week for Boris Johnson. Even before the weekend’s G7 summit began in Cornwall, the news agenda was already dominated by reports that the US government had issued a démarche to the British in advance of President Biden’s arrival. I must admit I had never heard of a démarche. During my years of negotiations with the Irish, British, US and other governments it was not a piece of diplomaticspeak I had ever come across. Apparently it is a formal diplomatic note or memo which expresses the grave concern of one side about the behaviour of the other. It’s not something that one ally normally issues to another. It’s certainly not something that usually finds its way into the media. There is no precedent for the stern message of concern delivered by the US government to the British government about Britain’s Brexit policy and its threat to the Irish Protocol and to the Good Friday Agreement. And it did find its way into the media. Some media reports after the summit reported that US President Joe Biden had a “candid” conversation with Johnson. Jake Sullivan, who is President Biden’s National Security Adviser, said: “All I’m going to say is they did discuss this issue... The president naturally, and with deep sincerity, encouraged the Prime Minister to protect the Good Friday Agreement and the progress made under it. The specific beyond that I’m not going to get into.” The G7 is made up of the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The EU is invited to participate as a guest as are a number of other guest states. This year’s meeting, which was hosted by Boris Johnson, had a wide-ranging agenda which covered everything from the pandemic, including the distribution of vaccines, to the climate change crisis and the upcoming UN summit on climate to be held later this year in Glasgow. The summit was intended by Boris Johnson to be a showcase for Britain as it seeks to reassert its leadership as a global economic power. Instead it turned into a PR debacle with a succession of G7 leaders privately, and some publicly, suggesting that the British government’s policy approach to Brexit and the Irish Protocol is dishonest and untrustworthy. To the annoyance of the British the media spotlight, especially the international media, turned time and time again to the British attitude to Ireland and the Protocol. One after another, state and EU leaders questioned British sincerity and good faith. In a tweet, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the EU Commission, wrote: “The Good Friday Agreement and peace on the island of Ireland are paramount. We negotiated a Protocol that preserves this, signed and ratified by Britain and the EU. We want the best possible relations with the UK. Both sides must implement what was agreed on. There is complete EU unity on this.” Michel Barnier, who negotiated the Withdrawal Agreement and the Protocol for the EU, put it more succinctly: “I expect him (Johnson) to respect his own signature.” British Ministers tried to shift the focus and to put the blame back onto the EU, accusing it of being belligerent and inflexible.

GERRY ADAMS: The Battle for Moore Street continues

MOST readers know that Moore Street in Dublin City Centre holds a special place in the history of Ireland. It was in Moore Street and the surrounding streets and laneways and at the nearby GPO that a fierce battle was fought between the 1916 republican forces and the British Army. Number 16 Moore Street was where five of the seven signatories of the Proclamation held their last meeting before the surrender. The National Museum of Ireland has described Moore Street as “the most important historic site in modern Irish history”.

GERRY ADAMS: Fail to prepare for Irish Unity and you prepare to fail

HARDLY a week goes past without some new aspect or commentary emerging on the issue of Irish unity. When will the unity referendum by held? What criteria should the British Secretary of State apply when deciding on the date? What is the role of the Irish government? What will the question/s be that will be asked of citizens? How will the referendums be structured and what new laws might be needed to facilitate them. The fact is that there will be a unity referendum. When it comes it will be the most important constitutional debate about the future of the island of Ireland in 100 years. As we prepare for it, it is worthwhile reflecting on the recent role of referendums in encouraging greater public awareness of and an engagement in democratic decisions that achieved significant positive change. The referendums on marriage equality and the repeal of the 8th amendment are the most obvious. The Irish Government helped prepare for these by establishing citizen-centred mechanisms – the Constitutional Convention and then the Citizens’ Assembly – to examine constitutional and societal change. This process of maximising democratic engagement in the process of change and in the referendum process was a success. 23 years ago the May 1998 referendums that were held north and south came at the end of an intense period of negotiation and a wide-ranging debate on the merits or otherwise of the Good Friday Agreement. Those referendums achieved a massive majority in favour of the Agreement.

GERRY ADAMS: Belfast tribute to two remarkable women

TWO Belfast women, Mary Ann McCracken and Winifred Carney, will soon have statues commemorating their heroism, leadership and commitment to social justice and freedom erected in the grounds of Belfast City Hall. It was agreed at the Strategic Policy and Resources Committee last week that the Council will now begin the process of costing and designing the statues.

GERRY ADAMS: Ballymurphy came out of familiar playbook

I WAS in Corpus Christi chapel in Springhill last week as the Coroner, Mrs Justice Siobhan Keegan, took almost three hours to read out her judgement from the Ballymurphy Massacre Inquest. Around me sat some of the relatives, victims and witnesses of those terrible events in August 1971 which left 11 people dead. 10, including a priest and a mother of eight, were shot dead. Nine were victims of the Parachute Regiment. The available forensic and other evidence could not confirm that the tenth, John McKerr, was killed by the British, although it is widely accepted that he was. All were deemed entirely innocent by the Coroner who described the use of violence by the Paras as “unjustifiable” and “disproportionate.” The 11th victim, Paddy McCarthy, died of a heart attack after he was assaulted and threatened by British soldiers. His case was not part of the inquest hearings.

GERRY ADAMS: We are indebted to the courage and resolve of the Ballymurphy families

THIS week the long running campaign for truth and justice by the families of the 10 people killed by the Parachute Regiment in Ballymurphy during internment in August 1971 was vindicated with the judgement in the Inquest findings. I sat in Corpus Christi chapel, close to where it all happened and where John McKerr was killed, with relatives of those murdered and other local people as the Coroners’ verdict was live streamed to us. ‘All the deceased are entirely innocent.’ Mrs Justice Keegan told us at the end.

GERRY ADAMS: Unionism at another crossroads

A centenary birthday is usually a time of great celebration. For most people and families, for organisations and for States. Irish citizens who reach 100 receive a special message from the President of Ireland and a Centenarian Bounty of €2540. The English do it differently. Their Queen sends a personalised message with a facsimile signature. The card comes in a special envelope, delivered through the normal post system. I have chums who are like that. Some like big celebrations. Others do their celebrating quietly. No fuss. Just friends and/or families. Monday was the birthday of partition. It was a century since the Northern State formally came into existence with the passing into law on May 3, 1921 of the Government of Ireland Act. Unionist parties, the British government and some others tried –unsuccessfully for the most part – to turn this into a birthday celebration. The British government’s colonial office in Belfast, the NIO (Northern Ireland Office), not the Executive or Assembly, was given the task of organising this. Some bright spark came up with the idea of using Seamus Heaney and Mary Peters’ images under the tagline “Our Story in the Making: NI Beyond 100”. It was supposed to be all about “the spirit of inclusivity, mutual respect and optimism.” It backfired. No-one had asked the Heaney family. The NIO claimed that the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University had given its permission for the portrait to be used but this was denied. There was outrage and uproar with many quoting Seamus Heaney’s own words: “Be advised, my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.” Others challenged the NIO title and its use of the word “Our”. For nationalists and republicans the Northern State was never ours. It was a place apart. Respect for nationalists or others was never part of the ethos. So no suprise that recent months were increasingly marked by strident and belligerent language from the Unionist parties angry at the impact of Brexit and especially at introduction of the Irish Protocol and the Irish Sea Border. The DUP tried to wash its hands of any responsibility for these. It sought to distract attention away from the fact that it had campaigned for Brexit, secured funding for the Brexit campaign, argued every day for Brexit, defended Brexit when the referendum was won and then fought with Theresa May and Boris Johnson when they thought the British Government was not delivering a hard Brexit! The DUP leadership lied about Brexit and the Protocol. They blamed Sinn Féin, the European Union and the Irish Government. Then came the Five Point Plan. The vitriol of Unionist leaders encouraged a climate in which small numbers of mostly young people from loyalist working class districts engaged in street riots and confrontations with the PSNI. There were also attempts to ignite sectarian conflict at some interface areas which failed thanks largely to the efforts of local community workers from both PUL neighbourhoods (fair play to them) and nationalist areas and Sinn Féin activists. Despite the very obvious fact that once again a British Government had betrayed Unionists and that Boris Johnson seems incapable of telling the truth, the DUP chose to believe him when he insisted that he didn’t like the Protocol and would change it. Then in the midst of this uncertain political atmosphere a majority of DUP MLAs staged a right-wing coup against Arlene Foster. There has been speculation going back several years that there were those within the DUP who wanted rid of Mrs Foster but it’s all academic now. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her and her family. I know most of the plotters. To my knowledge none of them went to her privately to tell her of their intentions.That was left to the media. I remember when Martin McGuinness was resigning that he insisted in travelling to Belfast to tell Arlene and company. Because he was so ill I tried to persuade him to do it by phone but he insisted that he do them the courtesy of telling them in person. And that’s what he did. According to Arlene she has not spoken to any of those who signed the letter demanding her resignation. But that’s politics without loyalty or good manners.

GERRY ADAMS: ANC, Late, Late and a 90th birthday boy

IRISH Republicans have long enjoyed fraternal relations with the African National Congress. For much of the past three decades there have been ongoing solidarity links between Sinn Féin and the ANC. During the years of armed struggle, according to ANC leader and Government Minister, the late Kadar Asmal, the IRA assisted MK, the ANC’s army. MK was founded by Nelson Mandela and others in December 1961. In the 1990s as our own peace strategy evolved, Sinn Féin and the IRA called its 1994 cessation Sinn Féin leaders, including myself, Martin McGuinness, Rita O’Hare and others travelled to South Africa. After the Good Friday Agreement was achieved in 1998 ANC leaders, including the current President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, travelled to Ireland to speak to the republican grassroots and went into the prisons where they met Republican POWs.

GERRY ADAMS: Huffing and puffing by unionists can't stop United Ireland dynamic

THE current unionist narrative seeks to present the present political crisis as the fault of everyone else except themselves. Mostly they blame the Irish Protocol element of the Brexit Withdrawal Treaty, the Irish government and the EU, and the funeral of Bobby Storey ten months ago. The fact that the Protocol was negotiated by the Johnson government encouraged by the DUP is simply ignored. The fact that the Protocol is a child of Brexit and that Brexit is a child of the DUP is also ignored. They also claim, as Arlene Foster did last week, that Republicans are waging a ‘cultural war’ on Unionists. At the same time the DUP stall and stall again on their commitment to introduce Acht na Gaeilge. According to Peter Cardwell – a self-professed unionist and advisor to two former British Secretaries of State – unionists are confused, bewildered, frustrated. Writing in the Irish Times last week Cardwell admitted that “the key tenet of unionism, in its essence, is its inflexibility.” “What is unionism without the union?” he asks. Next month Unionists will celebrate 100 years of the Northern State – Northern Ireland. Nationalists and republicans will not be joining them. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 which established two socially conservative states on the island of Ireland was the culmination of forty years of Home Rule agitation and three Home Rule Bills by Liberal governments. All failed to deliver even the minimalist self-government to Ireland that was promised. The Conservative Party successfully exploited the issue in its efforts to replace the Liberal government by using what Lord Randolph Churchill described as the Orange Card. The Tories engaged in a calculated campaign to inflame passions and undermine British Parliamentary democracy by supporting an insurrection against the government. A provisional government was established in the North. In the political negotiations around partition that followed the British spoke out of both sides of their mouth in their dealings with the unionists and the nationalists – promising each what they wanted to hear. So, here we are 100 years later and the unionist leadership is again playing the Orange Card. Whipping up fear and uncertainty; encouraging sectarianism and violence; making emotive and untruthful claims, all with the intent of intimidating everyone around them into conceding to their demand that nothing can ever change. In other words they demand that the constitutional status of the Northern state must continue in perpetuity because the key tenet of unionism is its inflexibility. They insist that the commitment in the Good Friday Agreement to the unity referendum be set aside because unionism finds it objectionable. None of this is acceptable. Partition was an undemocratic act by a British government in support of a national minority in Ireland. The rejection of the Good Friday Agreement because a minority of citizens in the North do not like the possible outcome of the unity referendum is equally unacceptable.

GERRY ADAMS: Unionists need to join the work of managing political change

THE recent loyalist sponsored violence and the provocative and inflammatory language of unionist political leaders has led to speculation about what the violence is really all about. I’m not alone in believing that it is in part an electoral strategy to maximise the unionist vote behind the DUP in advance of next year’s Assembly election. But it is also a reaction to the general direction and trajectory of politics, being shaped by the process of change including the potential of constitutional change in the relatively near future. It’s about intimidating nationalists and republicans and pushing back against the growing demand for the Irish government to begin planning for the unity referendum that is part of the Good Friday Agreement. Brexit too and the Irish Protocol with its border in the Irish Sea has played its part. It’s all of these things and more. But at its core it is part and parcel of the traditional unionist response to anything perceived as threatening its dominance. Unionists look around them and see their electoral majority in the Assembly and at Westminster gone. They see political and demographic changes taking place that spell an end to the long held belief that the Northern state will have a unionist majority in perpetuity. Unionists have also been deserted and back-stabbed again by a Westminster government that negotiated the very Protocol the DUP now denounce. This recent period has also been marked by significant strategic mistakes by the DUP leadership in particular and Unionists leaders generally. They gave us Brexit and all that has come with it. People aren’t stupid. They know this.

GERRY ADAMS: Why would Arlene leave Fermanagh?

THE past and present leaders of the DUP are currently singing off the same hymn sheet when assessing the tensions around the unionist rejection of the Irish Protocol. Peter Robinson’s assertion in a recent News Letter article that “we are perilously close to a line which, when crossed, will lock us all into a pattern all too familiar to my generation” would rightly be pounced on by political opponents and sections of the media if it were uttered by a Sinn Féin representative. DUP Leader and First Minister Arlene Foster told RTE that it is “dangerous when people think they’re being sidelined and not listened to.” Peter Robinson says that unionists “are more alienated than I have seen at any time in my 50 years in politics.” He omits the anti-civil rights campaign in the 1960s; pogroms in 1969; the UWC strike in 1974; DUP-led strike in 1977; reaction to Anglo-Irish Agreement 1985; anger at the Downing Street Declaration and rejection of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. His claim that there is a danger that for some unionists all of this will lead to an “estrangement from the political arrangements” that may then be “vented more robustly”, when taken along with Foster’s warning of danger, must be taken seriously.

GERRY ADAMS: On anniversary of Good Friday Agreement, focus should be on reconciliation

61 YEARS ago this month South African police acting for the apartheid regime shot and killed 69 demonstrators and wounded almost 200 more as they protested against the Pass Laws which were part of the racist apartheid system. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, like Bloody Sunday in Derry just 12 years later, reverberated around the world. It drew huge international criticism of the apartheid South African government, including by the UN Security Council. The British government abstained in the vote. In 1979 the United Nations General Assembly agreed that a week-long series of activities would be held annually in solidarity with people struggling against racism and racist discrimination. March 21 – the date of the Sharpeville Massacre – was set as its starting point. This year the theme of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was ‘Youth Standing Up Against Racism’. The aim of the campaign is to “foster a global culture of tolerance, equality and anti-discrimination and calls on each and every one of us to stand up against racial prejudice and intolerant attitudes”. Despite these efforts, racism, intolerance and misogyny are still very much part of societies around the world. The Black Lives Matters campaign has been very successful in drawing attention to it, especially in recent years. So too has the Me Too movement which has put a focus on violence and discrimination against women. The recent cartoon in the Sunday Independent which depicted Úachtaran Shinn Féin Mary Lou McDonald as a witch is just one deplorable example of misogyny as well as of the anti-Sinn Fein agenda of many in the southern media establishment. Hate crime, intolerance of and discrimination against citizens take many forms. Violence against people because of their race or colour, their sexual orientation or gender, their nationality or religion or their disability is wrong. All of us have a responsibility to make a stand against such injustice and intolerance whatever form it takes. Irish republicans believe that society must reflect and include the entirety of its people, not some of them. People have rights and entitlements. Their human dignity must be acknowledged and upheld. Inclusivity is vital. Equality is vital. The colonisation and partition of Ireland and the periods of intense conflict which resulted from it created significant divisions within Irish society. These remain unresolved. Foremost among these is the right of the people of the island of Ireland to self-government and to have maximum control of that government. A second crucial challenge is posed by political and religious sectarianism. As the debate increases around Irish unity so too must the debate on building an inclusive and reconciled society evolve and grow. Reconciliation and healing must be at the heart of the transition to Irish unity. But they cannot be a precondition to achieving it.

GERRY ADAMS: Micheál has it badly wrong on Irish unity

FOR almost a quarter of a century I used to spend my St Patrick’s Day in the United States talking to Irish America and political leaders in Washington. It’s important to understand that the St Patrick’s celebrations in the USA usually last a week – not a day. Consequently I could be in New York to take part in the celebratory St Patrick’s Day breakfast with hundreds of others before heading off to Philadelphia, followed by a couple of days of meetings in DC. I have some very fond memories of meeting Irish Americans at these events where they joyfully celebrated their Irishness through music and dance, poetry and craic. (YouTube video from New York parade in 1996 below.) On one memorable occasion we arrived in Syracuse in upper New York State for a St Patrick’s Day parade in the midst of a blizzard. We were not dressed for a blizzard. I walked shaking with the cold beside John Aherne, the Grand Marshall, who was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was wearing a top hat as he waved enthusiastically to all the heavily muffled spectators. John’s riposte to the fact that you could barely see twenty yards down the road was, “We parade in March because we are hardy. Anybody can walk in July.” Richard and I only survived thanks to the generosity of DeDe Walsh, the wife of the then Congressional representative for the district, Jim Walsh, who graciously lent us some coats and gloves. Rita O’Hare delighted in telling us off for ignoring her warning that it was going to be a cold walk in the snow. She still delights in telling that story. While no-one was able to travel to the USA this St Patrick’s Day because of the pandemic restrictions it was still nonetheless a good couple of weeks for the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement, the demand for the referendum on unity and for the campaign for a United Ireland.

GERRY ADAMS: 6,000 Days matches epics of prison literature

JAZ McCann writes very well. The reader is quickly drawn into his world. From the opening sentences of his prologue, Jaz paints the sights and sounds, the emotions, shocks, excitement, sadness, smells and the savage brutality and amazing horrors of his 6000 Days of incarceration, mostly in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. He also makes us witness to the incredible courage, vision, commitment, solidarity, idealism, generosity, quirkiness, anger, native contrariness, humour, comradeship and stubbornness of the political prisoners. 6000 Days is an important and significant contribution to the history of the Irish penal experience, in line with Jeremiah O-Donovan Rossa’s classic Prison Life or Irish Rebels in English Prisons and other historical penal narratives. I have long had a view that we republicans need to write our own histories. Others should do likewise. Including from a unionist or even in this case a prison officer’s point of view. By setting all these narratives together the weave of our collective history – as lived in cities or rural Ireland by women, workers, the poor, by combatants, victims and, in this case by our political prisoners – becomes a shared history.

GERRY ADAMS: Kathleen Largey was more than a singer

IT is my great privilege to have met many fine women and men over the years. The Léargas series of books is a record of some of these I came to know or to know of along life’s journey. It is very personal to me. This week I published the latest of these. The seventh book in the series is titled; ‘Kathleen Thompson – Up The Republic, She Raised The Battle Cry’. It is a tribute to my good friend Kathleen Thompson and it includes a limited edition of one of her most popular CDs – Legion of the Rearguard. Kathleen is for many of my generation the voice we most associate with the republican songs of the 1970s. With the intensity of politics and conflict in the North there were many groups and solo artists singing rebel songs.

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Gerry Adams

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