Gerry Adams by Malachi O'Doherty

Author:Malachi O'Doherty [Malachi O’Doherty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571315970
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 Eamon Collins, Killing Rage (London, 1998).

2 Collins, p. 220.

3 Malachi O’Doherty, The Trouble With Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA (Belfast, 1998), p. 145.

Chapter 16

Adams won the West Belfast seat in the 1983 Westminster general election but he was arrested the night before the vote. Standing as a senior republican put him in danger from loyalists, who would kill him if they got the chance, and drew the interest and close scrutiny of the British army and the police.

He had been canvassing in north Belfast and flying an Irish tricolour from the car and had been stopped and charged with obstructing the police and with disorderly behaviour. Though the flying of the flag was itself illegal in Northern Ireland then, he was not charged with breaking that particular law. He would have been able to make rich political capital out of it if he had.

But it wasn’t just the police and the courts he had to fear. Republican strength was always limited to the local area and Adams’s security was compromised when he had to travel to and from Belfast Magistrate’s Court for the hearing in March 1984. The case was heard by Resident Magistrate Tom Travers.

Travers was a south Belfast middle-class Catholic, of a type sneered at by republicans, a person with working-class roots who had left school at fourteen and was now employed by the state to defend its laws and structures. He and Adams, meeting in court, would each have felt the contempt in which the other held him. Travers was challenged to be an impartial judge because he was already familiar with the name of Gerry Adams. Adams’s whole political vision told him that an Irishman in the North should not be serving the state but seeking to destroy it, not sitting in power over him under the emblem and authority of the British Crown.

The magistrate heard the case in the morning then told Adams and his co-defendants that he would make his ruling after lunch. This was awkward for Adams and the republicans charged alongside him for they had to be on guard against the danger of attack. Adams asked permission for them to stay in the court building over the lunch break for their own safety but was refused it. He and his co-defendants then opted to drive up Howard Street, towards the Falls Road, agreeing en route to stop at Long’s Fish and Chip shop for lunch.

Two cars were trying to tail them.

In one was a group of British soldiers. In the other a loyalist paramilitary hit team. The loyalists got to Adams first, drawing alongside his car and strafing it. It isn’t a good way to get a clear steady shot at a target, but if a gunman gets enough bullets into the target car there is every prospect of a kill for there is not much the others can do to defend themselves. For a time they may not even know what is happening. Adams didn’t, not at first. ‘Then the car came in around me.

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