![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-529084480.jpg\")
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness carry the coffin of IRA man Seamus Twomey who died September 12 1989. (Credit: Independent News And Media \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\nGerry Adams has a story and he\u2019s sticking to it, even under close questioning. He was never a member of the IRA.<\/p>\n
Not in 1971, when he was photographed in a black beret, marching in a guard of honour at the funeral of a Provisional IRA man. Not in 1972, when he was flown to London with Martin McGuinness and the IRA chief of staff Sean Mac St\u00edof\u00e1in for secret talks with the British government (Mac St\u00edof\u00e1in later categorised the delegation as \u201cAll IRA\u201d). Not in 1987, when he was asked about the murder of Charles McIlmurray \u2014 a West Belfast taxi driver whose body had been found with a plastic bag over his face, his hands tied behind his back, and a gunshot wound to the head. He responded by saying on camera, almost indignantly: \u201cMr McIlmurray, like anyone living in West Belfast, knows that the consequence of informing is death.\u201d Not in 1993, when he helped to carry the coffin of Thomas Begley, an IRA man who died when a bomb he was carrying prematurely exploded in a Shankill Road fish shop, killing 9 Protestants, including two children. And never in the Nineties, when both he and McGuinness were central to the drawn-out negotiations that ultimately led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the cessation of the IRA\u2019s long campaign.<\/p>\n
By his own account, Adams himself was more of a loyal, if prominent, camp follower of the IRA, a reliable defender and justifier of the \u201carmed struggle\u201d, although not of everything it did. His fealty, however, ran deep: as he told the 2019 Ballymurphy Inquest, \u201cI have never disassociated myself from the IRA, and I never will, until the day I die.\u201d And, as he also informed the court in a Dublin libel action last year, \u201cI have never resiled from my view that the IRA\u2019s campaign, whatever about elements of it, was a legitimate response to military occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, if he argues that he wasn\u2019t an IRA member, what does he want or expect the public to believe he was? An intensely supportive yet occasionally questioning political co-traveller, it seems, who never joined the organisation yet nonetheless was involved in much of its most crucial decision-making over a period of more than 30 years.<\/p>\n
Others have a very different story to tell. They include diehard but outspoken IRA men and women; British and Irish intelligence and security services and politicians; and journalists steeped in decades of reporting on the Troubles. Over the years, Adams\u2019s continuing assertion that he had never joined the IRA began to rankle with a lot of people, including a number who had formerly been his close associates and freely admitted their own past membership. As time wore on, some former friends in the \u201crepublican movement\u201d felt that Adams\u2019s denial had become more than a pragmatic strategy to avoid arrest \u2014 the IRA was, and is, a proscribed organisation \u2014 and more of a long-term psychological and moral get-out clause. Some, such as his old Long Kesh comrade Brendan \u201cThe Dark\u201d Hughes, felt Adams was managing somehow to distance himself from the blood and misery of the IRA\u2019s long campaign, and from any direct responsibility for the suffering of its victims. Nor did Hughes favour the Good Friday Agreement, which he felt rendered the IRA\u2019s campaign, and its heavy toll in human suffering, meaningless by settling for less than its original aim of a united Ireland.<\/p>\n
Hughes himself had engineered the appalling \u201cBloody Friday\u201d, 21 July 1972, when more than 20 IRA bombs went off simultaneously in Belfast, killing nine and injuring over 130 others. But when interviewed in later life by the former IRA man Anthony McIntyre, Hughes said that Adams, in a strategic role, \u201cwas the man who made the decisions\u201d. Troubled by the long shadow of the conflict, Hughes died early, at 59. Of Adams\u2019s IRA membership, he had said frustratedly, \u201cEverybody knows it. The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs on the street know it. And he\u2019s standing there denying it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness carry the coffin of IRA man Seamus Twomey who died September 12 1989. (Credit: Independent News And Media \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
*****<\/strong><\/p>\n The dogs on the proverbial Belfast street, famously alert to politics as they are, are not habitually called upon to give evidence in British courtrooms. That task is left to others. Earlier this month, in Court 16 of the Royal Courts of Justice, Gerry Adams \u2014 by now the senior statesman of republican politics \u2014 sat on a court bench for hours, then days, as he calmly listened to barristers and witnesses debating his CV. Now and then he got up to stretch his back.<\/p>\n The space next to him was frequently occupied by his longstanding friend Richard McAuley, who was also a fellow prisoner in Long Kesh in the Seventies. McAuley has a long history in Sinn F\u00e9in public relations. Back in 1981, in his role as Provisional Sinn F\u00e9in press officer, he helpfully explained the rules of IRA \u201cpunishment\u201d shootings of youthful miscreants to a curious New York Times reporter. \u201cNo one is kneecapped who is below the age of 16. If he is under 16, he might get a beating.\u201d Most people, he said, were in fact shot in the thigh and not the knee: \u201cThey\u2019re in the hospital for a day or two and they hobble around for a week after. It\u2019s more the scare that\u2019s effective than the injury itself. It\u2019s awfully frightening to sit and watch a man pointing a gun at your leg. You have to be very bad to be shot in the knee, and if you are very, very bad you are shot in the kneecaps and elbows.\u201d The Belfast orthopaedic surgeon quoted immediately after McAuley was not so sanguine about the level of long-term damage: he said that roughly 10% of such shootings resulted in amputations, and one-in-five victims would walk with a permanent limp.<\/p>\n Also in the courtroom, sitting on the long bench behind Adams, was Barry Laycock, 86, one of three claimants in this crowd-funded civil action brought against the former Sinn F\u00e9in leader. Laycock, a British Rail worker at the time, was injured when the IRA\u2019s 1996 bomb in Manchester\u2019s Arndale shopping centre blew him across the room. He has lived with constant pain ever since, which he dulls with morphine patches. His expression was stoically impassive, but his blue eyes watched proceedings intently. His co-claimants, John Clark and Jonathan Ganesh, were victims of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing and the 1996 Docklands bombing, respectively.<\/p>\n The three claimants sought to establish that Adams was not only a member of the IRA, but was instrumental in directing the bombing campaigns which had caused them lasting pain and distress. They were asking for \u201cvindicatory\u201d damages of just \u00a31 each, but the real point of the exercise, Laycock explained, was that \u201cI want to see justice in the end, and I want to see closure\u201d. The witnesses on behalf of the claimants \u2014 testifying to Adams\u2019s pivotal role within the IRA \u2014 included a former IRA letter-bomber, a former RUC special branch intelligence officer, a BBC investigative journalist, and a retired Army commander.<\/p>\n Some spoke from beyond the grave. At the end of the court sitting on Monday 16 March, Gerry Adams sat listening carefully, stroking his beard with a greater frequency than usual. The rasping, confiding voice filling the courtroom was that of the late Dolours Price, a former IRA member. Along with her sister, Marian, she had gained notoriety for her active role in a series of London bombings in 1973: as two good-looking young Belfast women, they had attracted unusual levels of publicity and opprobrium when put on trial, and had been force-fed during their hunger strike in jail. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph a year before her death at the age of 62, Price recounted how, in advance of the London campaign, Adams had attended a meeting in Leeson Street, Belfast, and warned those present: \u201cThis is a dangerous operation, but a big operation.\u201d He had told those who did not wish to be involved that they could leave, she said. It was clear that Price still retained a certain pride in being one of the women who stayed, when so many men had left: \u201cI said: \u2018Hey, lads, don\u2019t knock me down in the rush\u2019. Swear to God, they ran out the door.\u201d<\/p>\n On Wednesday, an immaculately besuited Adams took to the witness stand for his second day. The previous day, March 17, had been his first experience of cross-examination in an English court: he had taken the time to wish the judge, Justice Swift, \u201cHappy St Patrick\u2019s Day\u201d. Throughout the questioning from Sir Max Hill KC, acting for the claimants, the former Sinn F\u00e9in leader\u2019s manner was measured, if occasionally prickly, and impeccably evasive. Bespectacled and silver-bearded, dutifully scouring the court papers \u2014 with a recurrent difficulty in locating relevant detail that may or may not have had an intended effect of breaking up Hill\u2019s flow \u2014 he had the puzzled yet attentive air of a retired sea captain invited to pore over a fusty log book.<\/p>\n Over the decades, Adams has perfected a response when directly confronted with indignation over IRA killings. He regrets the suffering of all the victims of violence during the Troubles, he says, including those of the IRA. When particularly horrific cases of IRA murder are pointed out to him, he doesn\u2019t hesitate to say that a particular act was \u201cwrong\u201d. Then he goes on to talk with practised certainty and cadence about civil rights and British occupation and armed struggle and the republican movement. He proclaimed himself \u201cstunned\u201d by the 1996 IRA Docklands bomb.<\/p>\n Alongside such lulling assurances, he doggedly continues to celebrate IRA members who committed sectarian horrors against their fellow Northern Irish men and women. On his X\/Twitter account, where he now describes himself as an \u201cOptimistic and Hopeful Activist\u201d, Adams recently retweeted a commemoration for Brendan \u201cBik\u201d McFarlane, remembered \u201cwith pride\u201d. The president of Sinn F\u00e9in, Mary Lou McDonald, staunchly echoed the sentiment, saying of the late IRA man that he \u201cdedicated his life to the pursuit of freedom, unity, peace and equality\u2026it was a life well lived.\u201d McFarlane, as the 24-year-old leader of a three-man unit of the IRA\u2019s Belfast Brigade, was the driver for a 1975 IRA gun and bomb attack on the Bayardo Bar in the Protestant Shankill Road. In it, five people were killed, and 31 injured. One, a 17-year-old girl called Linda Boyle, was pulled out of the rubble. She took a week to die of her injuries. Her younger sister Anne, who was 15 when Linda died, said last year, \u201cMe and Linda shared a bedroom together. I remember the exact clothes she wore that morning going to work. It never goes away.\u201d<\/p>\n It is this frequent clash between an official republican narrative and victims\u2019 reality that leads many Northern Ireland Protestants to mistrust Adams in particular and Sinn F\u00e9in in general, along with their own future position in any united Ireland where the party plays a leading role. They know that \u2014 behind Sinn F\u00e9in\u2019s palatable talk of inclusivity \u2014 if it ever faces a choice between mythologising IRA members and acknowledging the human misery that they caused, the former will win out. This has its dark mirror in the Loyalist paramilitaries and their grotesque commemorations for the sectarian killers of Catholic civilians: these organisations, too, publicly confirm their existence by riding roughshod over the pain of the bereaved. But the political traction of Sinn F\u00e9in, and therefore its domination of the narrative across Ireland and beyond, is far greater. It is now the biggest single party in Northern Ireland, and the second largest party in the Republic of Ireland.<\/p>\n There was one moment, on his second day of giving evidence, when the net did seem to tighten somewhat around Adams\u2019s IRA membership. It related to Adams\u2019s authorship of the \u201cBrownie\u201d columns in the Seventies, which were written under a pseudonym from inside Long Kesh and published in Republican News. He admitted that he had written some of them, but not all. In one, entitled \u201cDouble Talk\u201d, published in May 1976, the author said outright, \u201cRightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer\u201d. That particular one, Adams said, was in fact written by Richard McAuley. But the column spoke of the author\u2019s wife and young son, said Hill, and at that point McAuley had neither \u2014 yet it accurately described Adams\u2019s own family set-up. And the last \u201cBrownie\u201d article, published five days after Adams was released from Long Kesh in 1977, once again referenced his wife and child, and their reunion.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-528859811.jpg\")
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness attend the funeral of an IRA volunteer in Buncrana, County Donegal, 20 September 1985. (Credit: Kaveh Kazimi \/ Getty)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-154550552.jpg\")
Street near Whitehall, after an IRA car bomb exploded, 8 March 1973. (Credit: Central Press \/ AFP \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-2265307005.jpg\")
Gerry Adams attends the hearing in the case filed against him at the Royal Courts of Justice, March 10 2026. (Credit: Anadolu \/ Getty)<\/p>\n