For the second time in his ongoing defamation case against the BBC, lifelong republican Gerry Adams found himself sitting in a Dublin courtroom watching footage from the conflict years.
Last week he sat through the one-hour Spotlight documentary from 2016 in which an unidentified man who said he was both an IRA member and an informer made a comment that Adams claims was defamatory and for which he is seeking damages.
In the clip the man said Adams would have given the final approval for the 2006 murder by the IRA of the self-confessed republican informer Denis Donaldson. Adams has strenuously denied the claim and describes the programme as a “hatchet job”.
On Tuesday, a montage of clips from over the years prepared by the defence was played to the jury as Adams once again stepped down from the witness box and watched from the body of the court.
Man drove at more than 150km/h before debs crash that killed two teenagers in 2023
Cliona Ward, Irish woman held in US detention centre after family visit, released
‘She is leaving me over this’: Richard Satchwell outlined problems about buying monkeys in same period he is alleged to have murdered wife
Unionists must ask themselves: ‘is this as good as it gets?’
Mr Justice Alexander Owens warned the jury that the claims made in the programmes did not constitute evidence as to the truth of the claims they contained, but they may be relevant to the issue of Adams’s reputation if it came to the point where they were considering awarding him damages.
Dressed in a grey, three-piece suit, Adams watched as former IRA member Peter McMullen, in another BBC documentary, spoke about the Bloody Friday bombings in July 1972, where 19 bombs exploded in central Belfast killing nine people and maiming more than 100.
Adams, McMullen said, as the responsible IRA commander in Belfast at the time, had been at IRA meetings he attended both before and after the bombings, with no one at the latter meeting, as far as he could remember, showing remorse.
“He was smart, a good tactician, gave his men a lot of scope to do things,” McMullen said of Adams as an IRA commander. “Everybody liked him.”
Asked by Paul Gallagher SC, for the BBC, how someone would go about joining the IRA in the 1970s, Adams responded: “It wasn’t a path I took, that was a decision by me, not to join the IRA, to join Sinn Féin.”
It has 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, and he was not resiling from that position, Adams said.
“Let’s not box me into this singular person whose sole preoccupation was the IRA,” he said.
The long-time republican leader mostly spoke in a low, steady voice and, at times, gave lengthy, broad-ranging answers to questions Gallagher said he felt were capable of being dealt with more succinctly.
At one stage, when the issue of the republican movement’s lack of electoral mandate for its “atrocities” was mentioned, Adams responded: “Pádraig Pearse. James Connolly. The men and women who went out in 1916, they had no mandate for what they were doing.”
The public benches in the small courtroom were full on Tuesday and Adams’s evidence continues.
