Mick Clifford: Gerry Adams's case against the BBC shows rewriting of the past continues apace
Gerry Adams had a big victory on Friday in the High Court.
A jury decided that he had been defamed in a BBC Spotlight programme which had alleged that he had sanctioned the murder of informer Denis Donaldson in 2006. Mr Donaldson had been unmasked as an informer months previous to his murder in a cottage in Donegal. The BBC programme and an accompanying website article was published in 2016.
The jury awarded Mr Adams €100,000. The amount is far from the biggest ever awarded in a High Court libel trial. For instance in 2009, communication consultant Monica Leech was awarded €1.87m, later reduced to €1.25m, over a newspaper article that falsely made allegations about her private life.
Last December, a judge in the High Court awarded €140,000 to the businessman and presidential candidate Peter Casey over a Facebook post that made false allegations about accommodation he was providing for Ukrainians.
Parsing how a jury arrived at an amount is next to impossible, but being falsely accused of sanctioning a murder has to be one of the most grievous wrongs that could be visited on a reputation.
Much of the BBC's defence relied on its contention that Mr Adams had been a senior member of the Provisional IRA. He has always denied this. His counsel repeatedly stated that the former Sinn Féin president has a reputation as a 'peacemaker'.
Moral force of the Provisional IRA
One of the most interesting aspects to the trial was the evidence Mr Adams gave about his interpretation of the violence in the North, and particularly that the Provisional IRA acted with moral force.
The evidence he gave, it could be argued, provided ballast to his contention that he was never in the IRA simply because it suggested he hadn't a clue what the Provos were up to.
In the witness box Mr Adams said it had been his consistent position for 50 years that the IRA's campaign was 'a legitimate response to military occupation' but that 'civilians' should not be killed.
Gerry Adams (centre) outside the High Court in Dublin today. Mr Adams told the court that it was his position that civilians should not be killed, yet civilians were murdered at will by the IRA. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA
If the IRA's campaign was about 'military occupation', what would they have done if the Brits had been chased back across the Irish Sea? Continued killing those locally who consider themselves British until they succumbed to the nirvana of a socialist all-Ireland entity?
Contrary to the myths, getting the Brits out was not the overall objective. Fomenting civil war until the one million Protestants were battered into accepting a united Ireland was the ultimate aim.
Mr Adams told the court that it was his position that civilians should not be killed, yet civilians were murdered at will by the IRA.
The Provos murdered in the region of 1,700 people over the 25 years of violence. Of those, roughly 470 were British soldiers. (Various statistics have been compiled, all differ but only by very small margins). The most consistent number used for civilians killed by the Provos was 644.
They murdered far more Irish civilians than British soldiers. Among the civilians they were responsible for were the deaths of either 337 or 338 Catholics, drawn from the community the Provos claimed they were defending.
Statistics are a guide, not the full narrative. But the illusion that the Provisional IRA were primarily focused on killing British soldiers as part of an 'armed struggle' to end military occupation is completely at odds with the violence it engaged in.
Planting bombs in public places was a strategy of the organisation that persisted from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. This was conducted primarily to terrorise the civilian population into accepting the Provos' will.
Frequently, children were murdered in these bombings. How this might sit with an 'armed struggle' is anyone's guess.
Pearse and Connolly
Elsewhere in his evidence, it was put to Mr Adams by the BBC's lawyer Paul Gallagher that the Provos had no mandate to commit the 'atrocities' they were engaged in.
Mr Adams replied: 'Pádraig Pearse. James Connolly. The men and women who went out in 1916, they had no mandate for what they were doing.' By all accounts he kept a straight face when he delivered this apparent insight into history.
Pearse and Connolly took up arms during the Imperial age, against a power that ruled almost exclusively by force. Human life and violence were regarded through a much different lens.
The death penalty was in common use. There was no UN, no declaration of human rights, no universal franchise. Violence was deployed as a tool of first instance.
Director of BBC Northern Ireland, Adam Smyth and journalist Jennifer O'Leary outside the High Court in Dublin, after Gerry Adams was awarded €100,000 in damages. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA
Pearse and Connolly didn't commit any atrocity. They held positions for a week and surrendered to save the lives of others. They sacrificed their own lives. The Provo leaders continued to dispatch volunteers to kill and die for a united Ireland decades after they knew it could never be achieved.
Prior to Easter 1916, Pearse and Connolly provided input into a Proclamation that pledged to 'cherish all the children of the nation equally'. This was a specific reference to the Protestant population in the northeast of the island.
The Provos, by contrast, bombed Irishmen and Irishwomen indiscriminately for over 25 years. At one stage they conducted a concerted campaign to ethnically cleanse border areas of Protestants, which was their version of cherishing such children equally.
The Provisional IRA also terrorised the communities from which they were drawn. They justified, much as the Isrealis do today, any atrocity on the basis that it was necessary for a greater goal.
While the violence persisted, and even when it was officially over, they continued to behave as if they were an organised crime gang, robbing, executing grudge murders, intimidating and assaulting citizens who refused to bend to their will.
This went on for up to a decade after the 'republican movement' pledged to pursue its pollical aim by exclusively constitutional means.
They amassed a huge amount of money, but we have never been told where it went and whether any or how much was diverted into the political project being run by the non-violent arm of the republican movement, Sinn Féin.
To attempt to associate Pearse and Connolly with the morality and totalitarian instinct of the Provos would be a sick joke if it weren't so serious.
The reality
Of course the real comparison is the one that dare not speak its name today. For 30 years, the Provo leaders told recruits they were fighting for a united Ireland and the killing wouldn't stop until it was achieved.
Is that any different to what the dissident gang leaders today tell disaffected teenagers in disadvantaged enclaves of Belfast and Derry?
The reality of the Provisional IRA's activity was in stark contrast to the 'armed struggle' portrayed by Mr Adams. That would indeed suggest he wasn't a member because he obviously didn't know what they engaged in.
He had his day in court and he expressed himself pleased with the outcome. The jury determined that he did not deserve the reputation of one who would be involved in murdering an informer in 2006, eight years after the Good Friday Agreement. He is entitled to bask in that legal victory.
The trial was, in many ways, a blast from the past. The rewriting of that past continues apace, but it was interesting to have a rare forum in which the retro republican chic being purveyed was stripped of its spin.
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