John-Paul McCarthy: Adams – the diplomat with menacing air

Heart-breaking: Jean McConville's children in 1972, just days after she had been murdered

John-Paul McCarthy

November 10 2013 12:33 AM

'THERE was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed. That man is now the head of Sinn Fein."

This was how Brendan 'The Dark' Hughes accused his former comrade Gerry Adams of authorising the abduction, murder and disappearance of Jean McConville, the helpless, widowed mother of 10 who was snatched in 1972.

We heard Hughes's accusations and Adams's denials during Darragh MacIntyre's extraordinary Storyville programme, The Disappeared, last week.

Hughes's allegations echoed similar ones levied by another of Adams's former IRA comrades, Dolours Price, the woman who admitted to driving McConville across the border after her abduction.

MacIntyre sat down with Gerry Adams for the programme to hear his reactions and repeated denials of any involvement, but he came armed with more material than the McConville outrage.

MacIntyre asked Adams whether he knew anything about the disappearance of Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright, two young republicans who had been recruited by British intelligence only to reverse course and give the Belfast IRA crucial information about the Four Square Laundry spying operation.

On the famous Boston College tapes Brendan Hughes explained that he thought both men had been given immunity by the local IRA, but that they had been murdered and disappeared for purposes of "pure revenge".

An increasingly exasperated Darragh MacIntyre asked Adams if he was even aware that Wright, a Ballymurphy lad, had gone missing.

Adams replied: "Nobody knows these things. Please bear with me. Do you not live in the real world? People go off, people disappear, people bring back reports of having seen such and such a person."

A reply for the ages, you will no doubt agree.

The programme provided a vivid insight into Adams's character and formation.

Every major history of the Northern Ireland conflict is agreed that he was a senior Provisional commander in the Belfast area around the time of Jean McConville's abduction, and yet he continues to deny any knowledge of major republican operations in that city at that time.

If pressed hard, he pivots to the way he honoured President Clinton's call for the return of some of the bodies in the mid-Nineties, thereby attempting to extract an atom of political credit from the whole squalid business.

MacIntyre's dialogue may have reminded readers of Alvin Jackson's subtle profile of Adams in his Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800-2000.

Here, Jackson analysed the way Adams was simultaneously indebted to and trapped by the Provos' violence.

Jackson explained that Adams's so-called "peace strategy" was not really a repudiation of the armed struggle.

"On the contrary, Adams understood that the Provisionals' campaign was unlikely in itself to bring a comprehensive victory, and it had to be correlated with constitutional action to maximise the likely political dividends. Democratic action was a way of liquidating the otherwise unrecoverable political capital amassed by the gunmen."

This acute reading of Adams's thinking presents him almost as a kind of menacing diplomat, and this was what we saw in MacIntyre's exchanges with him.

Those who watched the harrowing 80 minutes in full may also recall that unintentionally hilarious intervention by Billy McKee, one of the founders of the Provos.

McKee was indignant at the suggestion that his generation of volunteers were the conduit by which the tactic of disappearing the merely inconvenient had been passed on from the Sean Sabhat era.

Explaining that he would have had no problem shooting someone like Jean McConville for informing, he was at pains to add that he would not have hidden her corpse on a beach.

Consider this formulation for a moment.

By his own admission, Mrs McConville's semi-shut-in status and the fact that she had 10 children would have counted for nothing if she did in fact help the security services, which she never did.

Note also the attempt to draw a bright line between the good old IRA and the meaner Provisional operation.

Irish speakers know better here.

Sean O Coileain's biography of the poet Sean O Riordain contained details about the time the local IRA abducted young Sean's mother in Ballyvourney.

She was abducted and held for weeks – because she was a stranger in the area and lived next to the police. They let her go, but the psychological Rubicon as regards vulnerable women had been crossed.

The next generation would go all the way.