Adams Kenny and the Kangaroos chat

Am I the only one who wonders what is this about? Taoiseach is written to by Adams. Then Kenny sort of might be about to talk to the Zoological Judges from the Kangaroo Court? What about?

I know you are decent men, volunteers all, uniting the country as suggested by Fine Gael the United Ireland Party. The 3sum or 4sum to discuss whether the body language of a young female leads them to a conclusion or rape or not? Trick or treat!

This absurd stuff is strictly for the PSNI, the Gardai, the NI Public Prosecution Service and the DPP.

Abbeylara – remember ………

Miriam Lord Wears Green Wellies!

This was not Leaders’ Questions as we know it – it was an unprecedented situation in the Dáil

Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader put Sinn Féin leader in spotlight over Cahill allegations

Miriam Lord

Not so long ago, in a troubled place they called the Six County Statelet, decent IRA volunteers indiscriminately murdered in a futile attempt to unite the country they love. But their hearts were in the right place. And that’s good enough for Gerry Adams, who is sad to see their revered names being sullied now by people who don’t understand.

These IRA volunteers had so much love for Ireland they shunted their favoured perverts and paedophiles across the North’s border to the rest of the country they claim to love. Oh, and they shot the ones they didn’t need to protect.

Decent people. Adams – the IRA’s Boswell – says he wasn’t a member, yet is remarkably intimate with the organisation’s inner workings; he won’t hear a bad word uttered against them. As he said yesterday, these volunteers “were acting, in my opinion, in good faith” when seeking “to deal with some cases of abuse when asked to do so by families and victims”.case claim ‘trial by media’

Good faith is not how Maíria Cahill would see it. Yesterday’s extraordinary session of Leaders’ Questions took place right after the Taoiseach met the Belfast woman who says she was raped by an IRA man and then sworn to secrecy by senior members of that organisation who took it upon themselves to “interrogate” her over a number of months to test the validity of her claims. At one point, three of them also forced her to meet her rapist during a “kangaroo court”. She says she met Gerry Adams in his office in west Belfast and told him her story. Adams, his deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald and the rest of the Sinn Féin parliamentary party accept that she was raped, but not the rest of her testimony.

Maíria Cahill hasn’t deviated one bit from her version of events. The Gerry Adams/Sinn Féin version has subtly shifted from almost blanket denial to a revised state of knowledge.

Both Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin wanted to hear specific answers from Gerry Adams yesterday to questions posed by Cahill. What they got was generalised remorse and a scripted reply on doing the right thing by abused women and children, interspersed with pinpoint indignation over the wrongs being done to decent members of Sinn Féin.

When you read back over the short transcript of yesterday’s extraordinary Dáil exchanges involving Enda Kenny, Micheál Martin and Gerry Adams, the words on their own go nowhere near conveying the electrifying atmosphere in the chamber.

In agreement

The Taoiseach and the Fianna Fáil leader were in agreement over the need to investigate how, as Micheál Martin put it, “the most powerful men within the IRA interrogated victims of abuse at the hands of leading members of the IRA”.

The Dáil did not accept the excuses of leading churchmen over their handling of abuse cases, he said, pointing out that Sinn Féin politicians were to the fore in condemning the Catholic Church when stories emerged of cover-ups over child sex abuse.

He read some of the trenchant comments made at the time by the likes of Martin McGuinness and Mary Lou McDonald.

The Taoiseach described Maíria Cahill as “a courageous, confident, brave young woman” who “overcame the horror of being raped to face down the IRA and its generals, secret or otherwise”.

This was not Leaders’ Questions as we know it. It was an unprecedented situation in the Dáil chamber, with the leaders of the two main parties challenging the leader of one of the biggest parties on the Irish political scene.

And they wanted to know why Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin should feel entitled not to be examined in the same way that the Church and other bodies were investigated when it emerged they ignored cases of abuse to protect their institutional reputations.

Gerry Adams was surrounded by his colleagues , with Mary Lou McDonald to his left. And they looked rattled.

When Enda Kenny questioned her “blind allegiance” to her leader, she slowly shook her head. As the session unwound and Adams rose to defend himself, his party, the IRA and “republicans” in general, you could almost feel the anger and resentment radiating from their ranks.

Adams sounded hurt and outraged almost to the point of becoming emotional.

Slur

To shouts of “shame” from around the chamber, he said the Taoiseach had “cast a slur on thousands of decent Irish republicans”. “Republicans are no different to any other Irish citizens,” he added

But as he read his script and issued an all-encompassing apology for any wrongs that might have been done by IRA members (who apparently were only trying to do the decent thing by responding to requests for help from ordinary people), the look of silent disgust on the faces of most of the non-Sinn Féin TDs told its own story.

And, of course, times were different during the war. (Maíria Cahill’s ordeal happened in 1997.)

“I have set out the circumstances in the North when there was no democratic civic policing service” explained Adams. What is needed now is a “victim-centred approach.”

Some of comments were treated with outright derision, like when he declared: “I refute the allegations that have been made about me and about other Sinn Féin members who assure me that all they did in their engagements, conversations and work with Maíria Cahill . . .”

“Work? Ha!” snorted Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath. But Sinn Féin – including their young political stars who are too young to know – were fuming, in full post-Vietnam vet mode. They just stopped short of shouting . “It was a war, man! You weren’t there!” Most of the TDs in the chamber had read of Gerry’s blog – in between teddy bear tweets and the like – at the weekend.

Community at war

Here’s a sample: “But these actions were of their time and reflected not only a community at war but also an attitude within Ireland which did not then understand or know as we now do, how deeply embedded abuse is in our society . . . as society became better informed as to the issue and handling of abuse, republicans began to develop victim-centred approaches.”

And we were transported back to other difficult days, in wood-panelled rooms in big parochial houses, when troubleshooting bishops spoke of different times and how nobody really knew about abuse and now that they do, they are really, really sorry.

As for those simple questions for Adams, put to him by the Taoiseach in the Dáil, there were no straight answers. In fact, the Sinn Féin leader insisted he had already “refuted” them. Refute means to prove – he offered little proof.

And what about the alleged abusers moved south of the Border, or “sent to another parish”, as Micheál Martin observed? “I don’t know” he said. All he knows is that decent volunteers have been done down by “sleeveen” Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin.

And them pure as the driven truck . . . laden with explosives with an innocent man chained to the steering wheel.

Fintan O’Toole: Tough questions for Adams on child protection

Opinion: SF wouldn’t tolerate evasive answers from other party leaders

In March 1987, Gerry Adams went to Buncrana to meet his niece Áine and her mother. They told him Áine’s father, Gerry’s brother Liam, had sexually abused her from the age of four. On his own account, he fully believed these allegations, though he “didn’t want to know the detail”.

He was aware, as he told his brother’s trial, “a person who would do such a thing is a danger to other children”. He was “very conscious, on the foot of such an allegation, that one has to protect other minors”.

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 brother’s 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 “basically he was out of my life more or less for about the next 15 years”. (He admitted under oath that “I 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 him”.)

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 Féin has a very strong presence and in constituencies that Gerry Adams has represented: the Muirhevnamor estate in Dundalk and west Belfast.

For most of this period, Gerry Adams knew with certainty that the allegations against his brother were true – in 2000, Liam Adams privately admitted to Gerry that he had molested his daughter.

Gerry Adams told the trial that he knew his brother was working with children in their “mid- to late-teens” in Dundalk. (Ironically, Liam Adams, described as a “youth community worker”, was quoted in the Irish Independent in July 1998, alleging there was a paedophile ring in Dundalk: “We have names of well-known business people who we are 100 per cent sure are involved.”)

He also knew Liam Adams subsequently worked with the youth club operated by Clonard monastery in Belfast, with which he himself had very close ties.

He claimed at the trial he told a priest (by then deceased) about his brother’s history of abuse. Clonard Youth Centre issued a statement saying that it had no record of anyone giving it information on Liam Adams’s history.

Dumped out

In December 2009, Gerry Adams told RTÉ radio that when, in 1997, he discovered Liam Adams was seeking a Sinn Féin nomination to run in Louth, “I moved immediately both to stop that and to get him dumped out of Sinn Féin without telling people why”.

The truth is that Liam Adams was never “dumped out of Sinn Féin”. A statement in the party’s own newspaper, An Phoblacht, in 2010 acknowledged Liam Adams remained active in “republican circles” and that he in fact became chairman of Sinn Féin’s Lower Andersonstown cumann for some years after 2000. The same statement also said, remarkably, that Gerry Adams was not aware his brother was the head of a cumann in his own constituency. I do not think that claim is credible.

At any point between 1987 and 2009, when he eventually made a statement to the PSNI, Gerry Adams, if he did not trust the police in Northern Ireland, could have gone to the Garda or to social services in the Republic, where Liam Adams worked for two significant periods with teenagers. He did not do so.

Into this context came a second disclosure of sexual abuse to Gerry Adams. In 2000, Maíria Cahill had several meetings with him in which, she says, she told that she had been repeatedly raped by a senior IRA figure. This time, the allegations acquired a specifically political dimension – one of which both the British and Irish governments must have been aware.

Restorative justice

At the time, as a quid pro quo for not kneecapping people, the IRA was being given significant involvement in the justice system through a scheme called community restorative justice.

In a 2005 public submission, the SDLP specifically referred to a report in the Sunday World in 2000 that a senior IRA figure in community restorative justice was an alleged rapist. This reference was to Maíria Cahill’s allegations.

It is inconceivable that Gerry Adams was not aware both of Ms Cahill’s allegations and of their political import. Yet we are supposed to believe he never asked her about the details of the case.

If Enda Kenny, Micheál Martin, Joan Burton or Peter Robinson had this abysmal record on child protection and this history of evasive answers, we know what Sinn Féin would have to say about it.

That not one of the party’s strong-minded women can manage to say it about Gerry Adams is deeply creepy. If you think ordinary cronyism is bad, consider what this party will do to protect one of its own.

Polls NI and the UK

GERRY MORIARTY

Northern Editor

Sinn Féin is maintaining its push for a Border poll on a united Ireland on the back of the Scottish independence referendum. In the Northern Assembly yesterday , Sinn Féin North Antrim member Daithí McKay said people in Northern Ireland also should be offered a plebiscite on independence.

His call follows similar demands issued by senior Sinn Féin figures such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness after the people of Scotland voted no to independence on Thursday.

Mr McKay said that the “public in Scotland and the public here do not want their politicians to continue to bend the knee to the Tories and the British treasury. It was a healthy exercise in Scotland. There was some scaremongering, but, across the world, Scotland has been held up as a shining example of how to hold a mature debate about future governance,” he added.

“We should have a poll in Ireland about whether Ireland is better together and, like I said, no scaremongering,” urged Mr McKay.

The DUP East Antrim MLA Sammy Wilson however was dismissive . Referring to a BBC Spotlight poll early last year, he said: “I am surprised that Sinn Fein wishes to have a Border poll, given that 25 per cent of its own supporters do not support its idea of a united Ireland. A vast majority of people here are in favour of the union.”

Mr Wilson claimed that such calls were a tactic to divert attention from Sinn Féin’s economic “incompetence” in Northern Ireland. He was also critical of the Scottish National Party. “I congratulate the people of Scotland for recognising the benefits of the union, despite the tartan terror tactics of the SNP during a very contentious referendum campaign,” he said.

Mr Wilson said it was a campaign “that saw academics threatened, civil servants abusing their power, public meetings broken up, businessmen told that there would be consequences if they did not keep their mouths shut and people afraid even to show their loyalties and where they stood for fear of having their property attacked”.

“It was typical of the nasty face of nationalism. We have seen it in Northern Ireland, and the people of Scotland witnessed it during the referendum campaign,” he added.

The SDLP West Belfast MLA Alex Attwood however praised the SNP and its outgoing leader Alex Salmond. “What they have achieved and how far they have travelled puts into sharp relief how little we have travelled because of those in our society on the state and non-state sides who, for many a long year, opposed the democratic approach and used coercion,” he said.

Mr Attwood also complained that Mr Wilson had allegedly used unparliamentary language is referring to “tartan terror tactics of the SNP”.

Alliance leader David Ford said the No Scottish result “was not actually a victory for unionism over nationalism” but a victory based on the promise from the British Conservative and Labour parties of “devo max” or extra devolved powers for Scotland.

Mr Ford wondered how Northern Ireland could look for similar additional powers when “we are currently running through a crisis because of our inabilities and our immaturity”.

He added: “It seems to me that, at the moment, we have a complete immaturity on economics, which is matched by an irresponsibility on some of the issues around parades and flags, and we have a group of victims from the past who are utterly let down by our failure in this place to deal with the key issues for us.

“It is great to talk about what the Scots have achieved, but unless we are prepared to knuckle down and engage in real and meaningful talks here to solve our problems, then we have nothing to say.”

Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt said unionists rejoiced in the result while Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister said it was “good to see the canny, wise Scots refuse the invitation to break up the United Kingdom”.

DUP East Derry MLA Gregory Campbell said the Scottish referendum was “done and dusted, and we now get down to the hard work of ensuring that people do not feel disaffected, irrespective of which part of this United Kingdom they live in and belong to.”

Sinn Fein the phony party

The two Sinn Feins

In the South, Sinn Fein opposes almost every measure the Government proposes as if there is an endless pit of exchequer funding. In the North, where it has to face up to the responsibilities of government, it has maintained and increased a high level of property tax, imposed public sector pay freezes and a range of other cuts.

Hypocrisy on local property tax
Property tax in the North is more than three times higher (€950) than the average property tax in the South.
In the North, Sinn Fein has increased the property tax 4 years in a row from 2011 to 2015.

Hypocrisy on water charges
Water charges are already in place in the North and form part of domestic rates bills. Sinn Fein has only deferred the introduction of direct charging for water until 2016.

Hypocrisy on public sector pay
In 2010, a 2-year pay freeze was imposed on all public servants earning over €25,000 in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, in the South, Sinn Fein wants to cut the rate of tax relief on pensions, which would result in a compulsory pay cut of several hundred euro for all public sector workers.

Hypocrisy on public expenditure savings
In the North, SF signed up to a 4-year budget slashing government spending by 8% across government departments from 2011 to 2015. Northern Ireland is currently preparing for the introduction of a ‘benefits cap’ which would cap social welfare entitlements.

School closures in the North
Approximately 30 schools have closed in the last two years under the watch of a Sinn Fein Education Minister and more closures have been proposed.

Hypocrisy on JobBridge
In the South, Sinn Fein opposes the hugely successful JobBridge Programme, which offers a €50 top-up to social welfare entitlements and has provided 28,000 internships to date.
In the North, Sinn Fein legislated for and implemented an equivalent ‘Youth Employment Scheme’. This scheme offers a top-up of between €18 and €55.

Inconsistent policies
For years, Sinn Fein wanted to significantly increase our corporation tax in the South. Now Sinn Fein are actively seeking powers from Westminster to lower the NI corporation tax rate and compete with Republic of Ireland.
Sinn Fein advocated a wealth tax for years and used it to balance the books in its questionable costings in successive pre-budget submissions. Last year Sinn Fein dropped its wealth tax proposal after admitting it couldn’t cost the proposal.