LEADERS IN WAITING: With Sinn Féin working hard to increase its Dáil representation, Mark Hennessy, Political Reporter, concludes his sessions with party leaders by talking to Gerry Adams
MH: What do you make of Michael Smith's statement that Fianna Fáil would accept, or at least not refuse Sinn Féin's support in the vote for Taoiseach?
GA: I think his remarks reflect the realpolitik. There is clearly no question of principle. The realpolitik is that I don't believe that any Taoiseach-in-waiting, or any aspiring Taoiseach will be at all slow if SF has the numbers to make a difference to seek our support. If I was ever sure about anything I am sure about that.
MH: What are your personal opinions about coalition? What is best for SF?
GA: You can't judge it purely in terms of what is in the best interests of the party. Because there could be other pressing imperatives. I mean the ongoing peace process. The best interest of SF, if you reduce it to that, is to continue to build political strength and not to be suffocated as a minority party in coalition.
At the same time, if the government is prepared to espouse policies which would advance the peace process, advance the Good Friday agreement process, improve the quality of life on a range of economic and social issues, and do the right thing on Nice, then SF would not just put party political advantage to the fore.
MH: Are you talking about being a formal part of government?
GA: Our current position is to vote against the government on issues which we thought weren't good, and to vote for them on issues which we thought were good. Changes to that require a mandate.
MH: Do you believe that the two main parties would negotiate with you?
GA: The real question is whether we would go into government with them. I don't think that there is any position of principle behind what they are saying. If SF does well enough and if involvement by us and with us is the price that some have to pay for returning to power then I feel their instinct will be to do another U-turn.
Look at the reasons they give. That there is a security problem. Yet, they will argue that we should be involved in the North's policing service.
We can't be trusted, they say. Yet they will commend our role in the peace process. Remember we have dealt with all of these parties over a long time in highly confidential discussions. They know that we can be trusted. They know that.
MH: Can you outline in detail what you want on Nice?
GA: We want the Government to stop treating citizens as if they were stupid, as if they were disobedient, as if they didn't count and to go back to the European Commission, to go back to the other EU partners and tell them that this Government cannot ratify the Nice Treaty except on terms that would be acceptable to the electorate.
You cannot keep running and rerunning a referendum in the hope that it will give you the result you want. People are expressing concern about the whole of the European Union. Is it going to be a superstate? Will it be a Europe of equals and partners. Are we going to have a Commissioner? Are we going to be sucked into military adventures?
Therefore, there needs to be a protocol. The Government clearly knows what is vexing the people. They should go back and renegotiate it and then come back if they have a decent package for a referendum.
Some of these most powerful European states are making no secret of the future as they see it.
You get Prodi, the Germans, the French talking about the need for a European army. You get them talking about being capable of having military operations 500 miles outside of the EU itself.
MH: You paint a picture of a nascent EU federal state that is militaristic, threatening and grabbing. It isn't a picture that would be recognised by many in Brussels.
GA: I don't know whether they would not recognise it. It may be more truthful to say that they would not acknowledge it. Why did the Taoiseach say that we would not get involved in the Partnership for Peace when he was leader of the opposition? Why didn't he just say that it was a great thing?
He obviously said that we would not get involved in it because he thought that it wasn't in our interests.
MH: Do you believe that Fianna Fáil's original PfP position was honest and truthful, because few even then believed that?
GA: To tell the truth, I am not even going to make that judgment. It was a expression of policy and a commitment not to do what was later done without a referendum. You then get a U-Turn on that issue.
We are not against the EU. We campaigned against the EEC, as it was at that time, back in the 1970s. A lot of our positions have been vindicated: the demolition of rural Ireland, the farming family unit, rural communities, all have been in steady, artificial decline.
But we now realise 20 years on that the EU is a reality. We have a critical attitude to it.
MH: You pulled punches on tax reform recently, and studiously avoided spelling out what it is you want. I mean what is your definition of someone who is highly paid.
GA: I can tell you my definition of what is poorly paid, more easily than what is well paid. Anyone earning £40,000 a year plus, before tax, is very well paid, I would say.
MH: So, tax for the higher paid - whatever the figure that you decide that to be - would be higher than it is now?
GA: The highest earners would have to pay more than they are paying at the moment.
MH: Could you put a percentage on that?
GA: I can't, at the moment.
MH: Charlie McCreevy changed Capital Gains Tax and doubled the income from it and he would argue that his system works.
GA: Works for whom? James Connolly said this long before Charlie McCreevy and I came on the scene that you only judge the health of a nation or a state by the quality of life for its lowest class. You can't judge it by the upwardly mobile.
I believe, and this may be a naïve view, but I believe that this part of the island is not yet mé féin, is not yet materialistic and selfish.
I think people must find it unacceptable that the public purse pays for private hospitals. That is why people are so affronted by what has been happening in politics. One of the big problems in this election will be to get the punters to vote at all. There will be a sizeable section who will just shrug their shoulders and think it isn't really worth it because everybody is involved in graft.
MH: So how do you square that with the fact that FF are riding high in the polls?
GA: There is . . . it is part of a culture of graft, of wink-and-noddism.
MH: Are you trying to say that the voters are corrupt?
GA: No, I am not. I'll tell you one of the things that I think is corrupt. It is taken as the accepted wisdom that Ministers can bring goodies home to your constituencies. You can drive through Ministers' constituencies and see where the constituency ends by the state of the roads. Politicians even going forward on the basis that they are going to bring a Merc back.
There has not yet been an alternative to the politics of conservatism, of wink-and-noddism, of gombeenism, of shoneenism.
MH: Does SF somehow believe it is morally superior to others in political life?
GA: I don't think that we have all the answers, but we certainly retain the idealism and the sense of public service that some others had, but which they have lost.
MH: But others find that nauseating from a party that comes from a community that was involved in a 30-year savage campaign, which is now lecturing them?
GA: We're not lecturing.
MH: What has SF learned from being in opposition in the Republic and in government in Northern Ireland?
GA: (That) anybody who goes into the system has to change the mindset of the permanent governments, even a good permanent government, even decent civil servants. I think the key to it is that you have to be in charge. You are the person who is elected with the mandate.
Obviously, these people have the experience, and so on, and so on.
MH: Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin was unable to answer a few straight questions recently about Garda killers, about explosive dumps. Why?
GA: You would have to ask him. I didn't hear the interview. Even if he had a problem, that is a matter of judgment.
MH: What would be your answer to those same questions?
GA: First of all, I think there is a responsibility, as I have said a number of times, to support the Garda Síochána.
In terms of people helping with criminality, we don't have any problem. In fact, we advocate that people do that and in a lot of these constituencies where we have any sort of standing or mandate we actually co-operate with the guards now.
MH: Regarding Omagh, you have not issued such a call.
GA: And the explanation that we have given for not co-operating - with the police service in the North and, at the same time, with the guards because it will end up invariably with the police service - is all validated by recent occurrences, by the way the Ombudsman's Omagh investigations were frustrated by Special Branch, the raid in Castlereagh, even the killing of William Stobie.
MH: After the North Kerry SF arrests, SF alleged political interference and then asked the Government to politically interfere with the Garda. Isn't there a contradiction here?
GA: There is undoubtedly a vendetta against Martin Ferris. It is undoubtedly the case. I myself think that there are a small number of gardaí in Co Kerry who in Martin Ferris's former life ran up against him at different times. He was - and he makes no secret of the fact - a very active IRA volunteer. He was arrested off the coast of Kerry with a boatload of guns.
I think that they are beside themselves that he could become the TD for North Kerry. I think that's what it is. It is all about sensationalism.
And then we hear about all these allegations about vigilantism. Vigilantism conjures up large mobs of masked, hooded riders descending.
MH: But there have been vigilante assaults.
GA: SF's position on this is very, very clear. We are not for vigilantism. We are not the police, and have no aspirations to be.
It took a decade and a couple of hundred people dying in this city to get the government focused on the problems besetting working-class communities here.
That, in my opinion, is a blight on the history of the last 10 or 15 years.
MH: A 1999 SF local election candidate was convicted of being involved in beating the living daylights out of a young man in Dublin. Yet you deny involvement in vigilantism?
GA: I could give you numerous examples which argue for the integrity of SF as a party working in this community. Members of SF families have died from the drug epidemic that has hit this city.
I go to conferences and I hear people telling me what it was like to sit up until four o'clock in the waiting room of a hospital. I have met guys in these areas who are absolutely and totally spaced out.
MH: There is an implication in what you saying.
GA: Which is?
MH: That people who are emotionally involved might go too far.
GA: Whether that is the case or not, for you to take one example and say that SF is involved in vigilantism is unfair.
MH: But every time we put the argument to you in more general terms, the party turns around and says "Give us evidence."
GA: You have given one example of one person. I still stand on the position. This party could quite easily decide to be involved in a whole range of strategies that would probably be popular in communities in the way you have described. We don't do it.
I make no apologies whatsoever for this party.
• Series concluded