Smokescreen can't make IRA's past disappear

November 07 2013 02:04 AM

ON Monday night we heard tapes again detailing Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams' alleged involvement in the abduction and murder of the widowed mother of 10 children, Jean McConville. The tapes played in the course of a television documentary again raise serious questions about Mr Adams' leadership of Sinn Fein.

On Tuesday in Dail Eireann Taoiseach Enda Kenny and other leading politicians challenged Mr Adams on the issue.

On Wednesday, just after Mr Adams had left for a visit to the US, Sinn Fein told us of other tapes (relating to Anglo Irish Bank) which it had given to the gardai and the Central Bank.

Can we see cause and effect at work here? Are we the only ones to whom the phrase 'political distraction' comes to mind?

The stories of 'The Disappeared' – those people abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA – remain the most heart-rending and infuriating accounts from what we euphemistically call 'The Troubles'.

Even after four decades, the story of Jean McConville – literally torn from the arms of her petrified young children in December 1972 – remains the most horrific of these accounts of the 'Disappeared'. More than 40 years on, the very stones on the roads of Ireland still cry out for justice and truth in these matters.

Gerry Adams, who absurdly and insultingly continues to insist he was never a member of the IRA, denies these allegations from former senior republican comrades Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes.

Dolours Price said she drove Ms McConville south over the Border on the orders of Mr Adams, her IRA commander at the time.

Mr Adams says the pair, who have since died, lied in their taped allegations to undermine the peace process to which he and other Sinn Fein leaders were totally committed. After his participation in the television documentary, Mr Adams used social media to appeal for anybody with information to come forward.

In the Dail on Tuesday, the Taoiseach looked directly at the Sinn Fein leader, and said: "The fact of the matter is that somebody ordered that Jean McConville be murdered. Somebody instructed that people take her away. Somebody instructed that Dolours Price drive that vehicle across the Border and somebody instructed that what happened took place."

Forty years on we are left with too many unanswered questions about some of these most heinous and cynical crimes.