Gerry Adams: Final draft of history likely to be kinder than the first
The first draft of history has been unable to achieve any clear consensus on Gerry Adams and what his legacy will be. As Mr Adams steps down as Sinn Fein president, explores what the final verdict of history may be.
MORE than five decades ago, Gerry Adams joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association as an angry 19-year-old. On Saturday, he will step down as Sinn Fein president after 35 years as party leader.
This journey and its impact will, no doubt, attract much ink in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
Amidst that analysis, and as the 69-year-old hands over the reins to new party president Mary Lou McDonald, only one thing remains certain: The opinions of those watching on in the Republic will be much as they were when the Ballymurphy man rose to prominence, via grainy, black-and-white news bulletins and depressingly bleak radio broadcasts in the 1970s and 1980s... divided.
In one analysis, Mr Adams is a brave peacemaker, the driving force behind a brand of republican socialism and activism which has delivered civil rights and equality for many. He is also the architect of a political transformation that has seen his party rise to become the largest Irish nationalist party on this island.
In another, he remains a Machiavellian figure, rooted in blood, a puppet master who sat atop an organisation that was, at best, an active cheerleader to the slaughter of thousands of people, north and south of the border and across the Irish sea.
It is clear, therefore, that the first draft of history has been unable to achieve any great consensus on Mr Adams and what his legacy should be.
As he steps aside from high political office, perhaps it is time to begin asking, in a more impartial fashion, what the final draft of history will make of it all.
Sense can only be made of Gerry Adams’ journey in the context of his, and our own, modern history.
In his 2017 book, Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love, Kerry author and award-winning BBC journalist Fergal Keane delivers a typically concise explanation of the antagonism with which Mr Adams, and the wider northern Republican movement, was viewed.
In a compelling investigation into his wider family’s links to the Irish revolution, Keane attempts, also, to understand the brutalities that Irish men and women inflicted upon each other in that period.
He recalls how, as a child in 1970s Kerry, he was struck by how people with clear familial links to past IRA activism were unflinching in their condemnation of the bearded provisionals — like Adams — who were overseeing the violence and carnage up North.
Keane suggests that, in time and with a view to other conflicts covered in the course of his life, he now feels this
unflinching condemnation was rooted in an unconscious and uncomfortable reminder of the horror and brutality on which their own Irish Republic was founded.
In this context, and whether those living south of the border like it or not, Gerry Adams, his political journey from bullet to ballot box, and, ultimately, his political legacy cannot be removed from the context of recent Irish history and its impact on him and on many more like him.
In assessing the more recent antagonism against Mr Adams and his party, the final draft of history will also inevitably point to fear.
A type of fear not unique to Ireland and a type of fear which rises throughout the world — particularly in post-conflict situations — in the face of any real or perceived challenges to the political and societal status quo.
A fear which, in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998, has seen a concerted determination by the established political parties south of the border not to go the way of the SDLP and the UUP in the North, and be lost amidst a rising tide of electoral goodwill — no matter how warranted or unwarranted.
When special Ard Fheis opens on Sat at 1pm I will be Uachtarán Shinn Féin.When it ends I will be one of 13,000 party members & Mary Lou McDonald will be the new Uachtarán Shinn Féin.I’m looking forward to new opportunities. Our best years are yet to come. https://t.co/2FqzPuTqI0
— Gerry Adams (@GerryAdamsSF) February 8, 2018
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael need no reminder, given the political landscape that emerged in post-civil war Ireland, that electoral goodwill flows almost exclusively towards those who are seen to win the peace.
Against this backdrop, there has been a clear, and perhaps fully understandable interrogation, by the various pillars of state, of Gerry Adams’ life and actions during the northern troubles.
The final draft of history may express sadness, however, that what should have been an interrogation aimed at bringing South African-style closure to all sides, via a peace-and-reconciliation process, became, instead, a political witch hunt aimed primarily at electoral damage.
Much to the chagrin of those who led this campaign, the final draft of history will also note, to use a prescient analogy, that it was with his own bolt cutters that Mr Adams cut the chains of high office.
Perhaps for the best clue as to how the final draft of history will judge Gerry Adams, it is wise to look to those less-encumbered by the inevitable prejudices that arise in people who live in a society afflicted by conflict and its consequences.
History will surely ask, therefore, why Gerry Adams was so reviled at home, yet so revered abroad.
What, for example, will the final draft make of the fact that Adams was invited by the Nelson Mandela family to form part of the guard of honour at Madiba’s funeral?
No doubt, Mr Mandela and his family had noted the parallels in the lives of these “terrorists turned peacemakers”. They are parallels that will not go unnoticed in the final draft of history.
Irrespective of all this, Mr Adams has made it clear that he has no interest in what the final draft of history will say.
He told the BBC, in a recent interview: “I’m not really interested... I won’t be around.”
Indeed, none of us will.
But, judging from the verdict we have passed on other Irish men and women who made the journey from blood to ballot box, the final draft of history is likely to be much kinder to Gerry Adams than the first.
As for today, perhaps it is best for us to leave that final verdict to the “seventh generation yet unborn” and settle, instead, for an acknowledgement that he is a man who, better than most, knew the cost of bullets and the price of peace and, thankfully for us all, was willing to pay the price of peace when it mattered most.
