I donât really have anything much more to add to this except to say that Martin appeared to genuinely realise and respect the Unionist tradition in the North and offered olive branches all over the place. This is despite being oppressed by these same people for years. The decent Unionists (and I donât mean the DUP) recognised this. A Free Presbyterian minister in Derry called him the greatest politician in the history of Ireland.
I was genuinely upset when Martin passed. I still feel a massive sense of loss - loss for this country North and South. @Thomas_Brady mentioned the IRA atrocities and that will rightly be discussed, Iâm sure McGuinness wouldnât have it any other way. But ultimately he came through and more than anyone stopped the killing in the 6 counties.
There could not have been anything other than growth for SF . FF were a mess & the government (FG & Lab) were implementing austerity for Troika . It was shooting fish in a barrel and still is tbh
Itâs between Martin McGuiness and John Hume.
It needed both men, and it needed both to be great men, both with more peace than violence, and more forgiveness than hate, and above all, honesty
Adams is a snake who shouldnât be mentioned in the same breath.
Adams is an incredible man too, like McGuinness he will forever be connected with IRA atrocities but those who pontificate and judge on those acts have probably never suffered a dayâs hardship in their life.
In March 1987, Gerry Adams went to Buncrana to meet his niece Ăine and her mother. They told him Ăineâs father, Gerryâs brother Liam, had sexually abused her from the age of four. On his own account, he fully believed these allegations, though he âdidnât want to know the detailâ.
He was aware, as he told his brotherâs trial, âa person who would do such a thing is a danger to other childrenâ. He was âvery conscious, on the foot of such an allegation, that one has to protect other minorsâ.
Liam Adams by now had another young daughter with another woman. But Gerry Adams did not contact social services or the Garda in Donegal. On his return to Belfast next day, he did speak to a social worker who had been assigned to his brotherâs family. He told her nothing about the abuse.
In a TV interview in 2009, Gerry Adams said two things about what happened subsequently that were radically untrue. He said Liam Adams left Ireland and âbasically he was out of my life more or less for about the next 15 yearsâ. (He admitted under oath that âI concede it might not have been for 15 years; I acknowledge clearly and I have never failed to do so that I was in contact with himâ.)
In fact, Liam Adams got four different jobs between 1997 and 2006 that gave him unsupervised access to children and young people in two different areas where Sinn FĂŠin has a very strong presence and in constituencies that Gerry Adams has represented: the Muirhevnamor estate in Dundalk and west Belfast.
Gerry Adams did not report his brother to the police for child abuse.
In 2000, Liam Adams confessed to his brother that he had raped Aine, but Gerry Adams failed to report this vital information to police for nine years.
Later on, and two years before he talked to the police, he attempted to gag the press from reporting it. Using British courts.
She explained that in 2007 he heard that a local newspaper was planning to cover it.
âHe frantically phoned me about 20 times,â said Aine.
âHe wanted to obtain a court injunction with my help to stop the story. He said he needed to make sure it didnât get into the press to protect me. Looking back, he was buttering me up. It was all about PR and his own image.â
Itâs funny how Jarry uses the instruments of the British establishment when it suits him.
I can understand to some degree why Gerry didnt go to the police in the early days â But justice, as what would have happened to otherâs in the nationalist community, should have been dealt out.
I donât agree with everything Hume did or said but I do acknowledge he was selfless in his efforts to bring peace to the O6 and gain equality for the nationalist community
The Provos were an absolute necessity for the nationalist community as the British and Free State governments were completely indifferent to the secatarian murder, intimidation, violence and deprivation against the nationalist community in the O6.