Gerry Adams gambled big and won big.
Not quite as big as he wanted but big. He was seeking more than €200,000 in damages but €100,000 is a statement he will feel vindicates his reputation.
“Peacemaker” or “peacetaker”?
That was the question the Dublin jury had to decide about Adams in his libel case against the BBC. Mr Justice Alexander Owens may have framed the questions differently, but that is what it boiled down to.
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In the end, the jury saw peace processor above paramilitary in a man who has always denied ever being a member of the Provisional IRA.
Days before the jury retired to consider its judgment, one senior Belfast lawyer said he felt it was “complete lunacy” that the former Sinn Féin president took such a case.
“He is taking a huge risk,” he believed.
Most of the audience for the BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme that carried the allegation that Adams sanctioned the murder of Denis Donaldson was in the North but the King’s Counsel (KC) wasn’t surprised that Adams’s legal team pursued the claim for defamation in Dublin’s High Court because it would have been a much bigger risk taking the case in the North.
And then the KC began to reconsider. But this was a Southern jury with a different experience and perhaps a different perspective.
The predominantly younger age profile of the jury – aged 25 to 35 – suggests that they may have had no real contemporaneous memory of the death, misery and horror the IRA inflicted with Adams, allegedly, as one of its senior leaders.
The same lawyer, reflecting a bit more, then took note of how among Adams’s legal team was Paul Tweed, solicitor to international film and rock stars and celebrities. He has represented the likes of Hollywood stars Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson and singers Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears, and is viewed as one of the most feared defamation lawyers in the business.
“Paul Tweed wouldn’t have taken this case on unless he thought he had a reasonable crack at winning it,” mused the KC, having second thoughts.
And so it proved. Adams bet the house and grabbed the pot.
Writer and broadcaster Malachi O’Doherty, author of an unauthorised biography of Adams, said this victory would satisfy Adams’s large ego and vanity.
[ Book review: Gerry Adams – An Unauthorised Life by Malachi O’DohertyOpens in new window ]
“He will feel morally vindicated by the result. He will feel good about himself,” he said.
O’Doherty, who last year had a libel case brought against him by Sinn Féin MLA Gerry Kelly thrown out by the High Court as “scandalous, frivolous and vexatious”, also suspected that it “would inject confidence back into the whole Sinn Féin strategy of using the defamation laws” against the media.
Entering Adams’s twilight zone
When dealing with Adams, there is often that sense of entering a twilight zone where truth and reality are blurred. He took the libel case against the BBC because, as he said, the Spotlight current affairs programme broadcast a lie in alleging he sanctioned the murder of Denis Donaldson.
Yet, in giving his evidence he swore an oath that he would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And soon into his cross-examination we were back into his again denying that he was in the IRA or that for many years he served on its ruling army council.
Whatever about south of the Border, there is hardly a person in Belfast, or indeed in Northern Ireland – or indeed any republican living on or off the Falls Road who lends credence to that claim.
For Sinn Féin and IRA supporters generally, they just shrug their shoulders and say that if Adams feels that his denial of IRA membership is something he must persist with, then so be it.
“Gerry knows best,” tends to be the response of the faithful.
Some regular challenges to his claim he was never in the IRA were raised by counsel for the BBC. They include how in 1972 he was released from internment so he could be part of a delegation flown to London to discuss with senior British government representatives how to end the IRA campaign of violence. As usual, he said he was in London representing the Sinn Féin leadership and not the IRA.
He has issued so many such denials over the years that repeating them would have been a cakewalk for Adams in the witness box.
But still, surely inwardly, he bridled at the manner in which former minister of justice and attorney general Michael McDowell dealt with these denials when called to give evidence on behalf of the BBC.
In cross-examination John Kerr, a barrister for Adams, put it to McDowell that he made no secret of his hatred of Sinn Féin.
“Hatred is one way of putting it,” McDowell said in agreement.
McDowell allowed that Adams played a “central role” in achieving the 1998 Belfast Agreement, as did others, but said that he “represented himself entirely falsely in my view as a go-between between the IRA and the political process, whereas in fact he was the dominant character in the IRA at that time”.
McDowell couldn’t resist another dig in granting Adams “the credit of common sense” of recognising that the IRA had been defeated. That would have irked Adams who holds to the line the IRA was never defeated. Now, Adams will likely feel, following that joust with McDowell, that he who laughs last laughs longest.
A damaging blow for the BBC
The BBC, and its flagship investigative programme Spotlight have been hit a damaging blow and will have a lot to consider this weekend. Adams has succeeded, as he said during the trial, in “putting manners” on them.
Spotlight reporter Jennifer O’Leary pursued the story when contacts told her the IRA had murdered Donaldson and “let dissidents make the claim of responsibility”, with Adams allegedly sanctioning the murder that was carried out near Glenties in Co Donegal in 2006.
It wasn’t until 2009 that the Real IRA said it was responsible for the killing of Donaldson who – while secretly working for MI5, the RUC and later the Police Service of Northern Ireland - ran the Sinn Féin office at Stormont where he worked shoulder to shoulder with Adams and Martin McGuinness.
It is worth mentioning that the judge decided against permitting evidence from three witnesses the BBC wanted to put forward to assist its case. One of them was Jane Donaldson, daughter of Denis Donaldson.
In the absence of the jury, she said that the family had an “open mind” on who killed her father and did not believe the claim by the Real IRA that it was responsible. She said that “bogus claim of responsibility” by a single Real IRA source in 2009 three years after the killing lacked all credibility.
The detail in the admission “didn’t correlate with an awful lot of the sensitive and confidential information we’d gathered from the gardaí”, she said.
The judge, however, found that this evidence wasn’t “terribly relevant” to the issues to be decided by the jury so she did not get to make these points with the jury present in the courtroom.
Personality always has served Adams well, as has his sense of humour. For some during the bloody years of the Troubles, he and the late McGuinness, another leader who disavowed much of his IRA past, were characterised as romanticised Fidel Castro- and Che Guevara-type figures.
Adams’s courtroom tactics that triggered laughter
Since handing over the leadership to Mary Lou McDonald, Adams has morphed into more of an avuncular sometimes whimsical person but also a grand venerable of the republican movement. In court that was how he was portrayed and how he portrayed himself.
The BBC lawyers, in playing to the IRA leadership allegation, also referred to Adams in the early 1970s shouldering the coffin of an old republican while wearing the black beret associated with IRA membership.
Adams said he did not recognise this as “effectively” the IRA’s uniform, as it was put to him. He then reflected that from the picture he looked like the ineffectual Frank Spencer character in the old TV comedy Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. That triggered laughter in court.
Adams deployed the same tactic when asked about the Disney series Say Nothing by New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. No, he hadn’t seen it.
[ Say Nothing: Bingeable yet sober-minded eulogy for the tragedy of the TroublesOpens in new window ]
“Life’s too short to watch Disney, especially when it is dealing with serious issues,” he replied.
That too seemed to go down well with some members of the jury.
It also may have deflected them from the serious allegation in Say Nothing that he was a pivotal figure in the decision to abduct, murder and secretly bury or disappear Jean McConville, the widowed mother of 10 children, an allegation that he has always rejected.
[ Family of Jean McConville criticise ‘hurtful’ Disney+ dramatisationOpens in new window ]
His gentle canter through his life story at the outset of the hearing also allowed him to play to his theatrical strengths.
He seemed to impress the jury with the stories of discrimination, Ian Paisley, the civil rights movement, the actions of the B-Specials, and so on.
Here too he could present himself as just a regular-type guy whose “biggest ambition was to win an All-Ireland with the Antrim hurling team”.
Former US congressman Bruce Morrison gave evidence for Adams via video link from near Washington, DC, describing him as an “elder statesman” and a “serious man on a serious mission” to achieve peace.
Singer and friend Christy Moore spent a couple of hours in the court on one of the days and took time to chat with him outside the court, which allowed photographers grab some useful pictures.
‘Peacemaker’ or ‘peacetaker’?
The BBC, as well as McDowell, offered their own witnesses with a different take on the life and times of Adams.
Ann Travers, whose sister was shot dead and her father seriously wounded by the IRA, as they were leaving Mass in south Belfast in 1984 described Adams as a “warmonger” who was “heavily involved” in the murder of innocent people.
Adams, she said, had “cast a long and dark shadow” over her life. She “would even have a fear of him”, she added.
Former Ireland rugby international and solicitor Trevor Ringland said Adams had a reputation as a “peacetaker” rather than a “peacemaker”.
In the end, the “peacemaker” argument took precedence with the jury, it seems.
There are many who will have different views, but that will hardly bother Adams this weekend. The stakes were huge and he carried the day.
The jury’s verdict will boost his legacy and his vanity. A win is a win is a win.
