Gerry Adams

[Magda Hassan]

Gerry Adams' arrest marks the end of his career in the south

Just days ago Adams was the Irish Republic's most popular leader but the other big parties won't go into office with him now

• • Malachi O'Doherty
    
    
  • The Guardian, Friday 2 May 2014 05.23 AEST
    
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Gerry Adams. 'The majority of the Sinn Féin support base [will not be daunted] if it emerges that he has blood on his hands.' Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images

We can be confident that Gerry Adams has not been sitting in his cell chewing on self-doubt. The president of Sinn Féin, who was arrested this week in connection with the 1972 kidnapping, murder and burial of widowed mother-of-10 Jean McConville, has been the target of opprobrium for more than 40 years and has shown himself impervious to it.
He has been imprisoned and shot, and reviled in the media but has come through all that stoically. When charged with trying to escape from internment in 1974, he sat darning his socks and ignoring proceedings.
Adams knows that he is widely loved by those who supported the IRA through its worst days. Those who were going to desert him in horror over the past have already done so. He has already been through a redemption, if not in his own heart then certainly in the minds of Irish people. What he did before giving up the armed struggle is not considered relevant.
Adams has many times held his nerve and maintained his course when others said he was a murderer, the defender of a child abuser that is, of his convicted brother Liam and when journalists harangued him about bombings in which innocents died.
This is a man who doesn't do doubt. This time the party line is that his arrest was politically motivated; that with elections coming in three weeks, this is a way to tarnish Sinn Féin.
North of the border people who vote Sinn Féin are of two types. There are those who supported the IRA and believe the campaign was a good thing. They aren't going to be affected by his arrest; there is nothing for them to be disillusioned about. Then there are republican critics of Adams, who accuse him of selling out for a career. They will be quietly glad he is in difficulty now.
But the major part of the Sinn Féin support base, which is now most of the nationalist community, maintains it loyalty to the party and Gerry Adams as a reward for peacemaking. It wouldn't daunt them were it to emerge that he has blood on his hands; they like him because they know he made war and credit him with having changed.
True, most nationalists rejected the IRA during its armed campaign and voted instead for the SDLP which opposed violent revolution. But those distinctions are dissolving. Last month Clonard monastery in west Belfast held a mass for "the patriot dead", bringing together families of dead IRA bombers and killers. That's how respectable a past in the IRA has become.
Where Adams can suffer is in the Irish Republic. He shifted his political base there and took a seat in the Dublin parliament, the Dáil. For years his party has relentlessly increased its support, yet its northern and southern expressions are growing apart. One irony, if he fell, might be that Sinn Féin would be partitioned, effectively evidence that partition is organic and inevitable in Ireland.
Adams, just a few days ago, was the most popular political leader in the south. And some there will detect machinations behind the decision to arrest him.
But it is not only public opinion that matters. The prospect of political power in the south depends on coalition with at least one of the other big parties. And the leaders of Labour, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will be squeamish about going into office with, deputising or being deputised by, a man who was a suspect in McConville's horrific murder.
Therefore Adams's southern political ambitions are now dead, whatever happens next. The hard part might be getting such a resilient and impervious man to believe that.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...of-ireland