Eoghan Harris: Adams must finish voyage round the sins of our fathers
To believe or not to believe? Like Hamlet, haunted by the ghost of his father, Gerry Adams's motives are mysterious, maybe even to himself. Here I hope to show that Shakespeare -- whose genius was to grasp that characters can be both good and bad -- can shed light, not only on Adams, but on all who call themselves Irish nationalists.
First, however, I do not want to be taken for a fool. Adams's revelations about his abusive father have played well in the Irish Republic. Down south, we are too soft to believe a man may smile and smile and be a villain. Northern nationalists are a bit more sceptical. With good reason.
Given Adams's frugal attitude to the truth in the past, why should we accept his spin on the abuse story? Was he not aware his revelations would divert attention from the alleged victim to himself? Could he be piggybacking a bit on southern sympathy for abuse victims?
Like Hamlet, I am torn in what I think. The dark side of me delights in Adams's discomfiture. But my better self points to the Peace Process. So I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt because I do not believe in giving into ghosts, even to good ghosts.
The Ghost in Hamlet is not a good ghost. Like the ghost of Gerry Adams Snr, he wants his son to follow his bloody path. Like Hamlet, Gerry Adams must voyage around the sins of his father. Shakespeare's play is a map of that moral journey.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is basically a scholarly and sensitive man. Then the Ghost of his father
appears to him and demands his son avenge his murder. After a battle with his better self, Hamlet gives in. But in spite of his stated noble motives, by the end the stage is filled with bodies.
Contrary to what we were taught in school, the Ghost is not some wispy figure wearing a long white robe. Like Adams Snr -- who served seven years for the attempted murder of a policeman -- he is a military figure and appears armed from head to toe. Hamlet: "Arm'd say you?" Horatio: "Arm'd my lord."
Hamlet's father, a former pirate, is in purgatory until he has purged his sins. But his stint in this small hell has still not cured him of his cruel passions. He demands his son follow the same bloody path.
Likewise, Adams Snr called on his son to carry on the bloody struggle against the British, and, if it came to it, the Prods. But Adams was not alone in answering that call. The ghost of my own IRA grandfather put me on the same republican path, around the same time as Adams.
Luckily it led me to Cathal Goulding, who had learned the limits of the gun. Had I been born in Belfast it might have led me to the bloodthirsty figures of Joe Cahill and Seamus Twomey. Today their ghoulish spectres are again asking young Hamlets to believe that the ends justify the means.
Shakespeare has no time for this nonsense. He seeds the play with signals that bloodshed brings more bloodshed. Even in the act of recruiting Hamlet to revenge him, the Ghost admits that murder is always a moral pit: "Murder most foul, as in the best it is".
That is why Hamlet has to freeze his heart and suppress his true self. Hence the delay, the depression and the descent into the madness of his "antic disposition". To do the deed, he has to destroy the soft and sensitive side of himself.
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.
Anyone who reflects on the above must be struck by similarities between Hamlet and Adams. They share the same bookish, brooding and even depressive disposition. We can sympathetically conclude that, like Hamlet, Adams paid a terrible personal price in answering his father's call. And he is not alone.
Right now Irish society is riven by the same lethal legacy. Daniel Corkery, the influential ideologue of Irish nationalist identity, believed that Irish identity was composed of a trinity of passions: land, religion and nationality. My belief is the exact opposite. I believe that Irish identity is based on a distortion of these three passions.
Land, and the lust for land, has morphed into our passion for property speculation. Religion has regressed to a repulsive repressive sexuality in the Roman Catholic Church. Nationality has come to mean a nasty nationalism which had no time for northern Protestants.
Secrecy is the shared sin of Corkery's unholy trinity. (Significantly, Hamlet suggests an oath of secrecy to his men.) Land wars were conducted by secret societies -- as secretive as the cabals who shared the spoils of property speculation. Religion, in the form of Irish Catholicism, ruled with a culture of secrecy. Nationalism, in the form of the IRA, demands secrecy on pain of death.
Corkery's trinity lives on lies. All of the three groups practice mental reservations. You have a duty to deny, to divert, to cover up. And this applies whether it's abuse of public trust for private profit, the abuse of Andrew Madden, or the murder of Jean McConville.
But we are not bound to behave like Hamlet. We do not have to accept Corkery's trinity or the agenda of the Ghosts who guard it. We can replace land with landscape, replace Roman Catholic power with a reformed church, replace a poisonous nationalism with a pure patriotism that promotes the common good.
Adams's own act of good authority shows we can live in hope. He grew up with a Ghost who demanded revenge. But in an epic escape from an evil war, the son finally rejected his father's revenge agenda and made peace on his own account.
Like many Irish nationalist leaders, Adams began by trying to please the ghosts of the past. Like Hamlet, he found the stage filling with bodies, most of them innocent. But unlike Hamlet, Adams allowed his better angel to have the last word, and bid his soldiers to stop shooting.
The Adams voyage is around the sins of all our fathers. And it will take truth to light us home. Like Albert Speer, Adams is in denial about some of the darker deeds done on his watch. But unlike Speer -- who went to his grave lying to himself -- Gerry Adams can still act with good authority.
As a start he should stop talking about how his father's abuse "besmirched" the tricolour. Because in making peace Adams implicitly rejected his father's fanatic politics. This suggests that Adams found his father out, not just on the personal level, but on the political level too. Time he took the final step and admitted that the armed struggle "besmirched" the tricolour as much as abuse.
For his sake, and ours, Gerry Adams needs to go to journey's end. He should call Tommie Gorman back and tell his true story. The story of a Hamlet who listened for 30 years to the gruesome ghosts of Irish nationalism, but finally found the guts to tell them to go away.
- Eoghan Harris
Originally published in
