Gerry Adams offered an unintended explanation for the refusal of unionists to engage in powersharing in Northern Ireland with Sinn Féin right now. This was in the course of his televised presidential address to the Sinn Féin Ardfheis on Saturday afternoon. And there was an aspect to that address that gave a disconcerting insight into tensions in the republican movement, writes Vincent Browne
The speech was aimed not at the wider national audience, whatever that was at 5pm on a Saturday. It was directed at an internal republican audience, which seems bizarre. So much of the speech was a reassurance to the republican heartland that he at least was keeping the republican faith. There was the invocation of the 1981 hunger strikers, the commemoration of 1916, references to the "courage" of the IRA and praise for the IRA "cessation" now over 10 years ago. Yes, this is the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike and the 90th anniversary of the Rising, but to have devoted so much of the speech to these anniversaries seemed bizarre, unless this was intended as reassurance.
A few passing references would have sufficed, surely, if the speech was directed at a broader audience? That he went on so long with preoccupations that are largely exclusive to republicans suggests he was soothing tensions within the movement, and had to forfeit an appeal to a wider audience to calm internal apprehensions.
It has been obvious there have been such internal tensions for well over a year. The Northern Bank robbery was almost certainly conducted without the prior knowledge of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and, incidentally, the Irish Government knows this but has not acknowledged it. In the early months of 2005, there were signs that Gerry Adams had lost control of the movement. He regained it in April when he made his speech asking the IRA to stand down. The response took far longer than he or Martin McGuinness anticipated, which suggests some internal opposition. And the form of the "standing down" seems not to have been exactly along the lines favoured by Adams. But he won that day.
It seems there remain tensions within the organisation which Adams used his ardfheis speech to address. And precisely because he is fixated with internal issues - or at least seems so - he is unable to address the issues in the minds of those with whom he seeks to go into government. Indeed worse than that: his language and his focus are almost calculated to infuriate his would-be partners.
He recalled 1981, mentioned that in that year Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island and Gen Pinochet was in power in Chile. "But for many Irish people, that period brings back immediate memories of those long eight months in 1981 when Bobby Sands, Francie Hughes, Patsy O'Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Tom McElwee and Michael Devine, all died on hunger strike."
For genuine personal reasons, as well as politics, it is understandable Gerry Adams had to recall the hunger strikers. But for many Irish people 1981 will be remembered for other reasons as well. A total of 117 died in the conflict that year and republicans murdered 64 of them, including: Norman Stronge, a retired unionist MP, along with his son, James Stronge (48), killed "as symbols of hated unionism" by the IRA; five British soldiers murdered at Camlough on May 19th, right in the middle of the hunger striker deaths - they (John King, Paul Bulman, Andrew Gavin, Michael Bagslaw and Grenville Winstone) are never remembered; several off-duty UDR and RUC members, many of them murdered in appalling circumstances; and the Rev Robert Bradford, a Westminster MP murdered on November 14th, 1981.
So in that same year of the hunger-striker deaths, the IRA murdered two representatives of the community with whom they now want to share power. And they wonder why the current representatives of that community are reluctant to do so, when they do not and have never uttered regret or an apology for those deaths.
The unionist community deeply distrusts Sinn Féin and with understandable reason: Sinn Féin, they believe (reasonably), was the instrument of a war of terror and murder inflicted against their community for a quarter of a century. Of course, other factors play a part in current unionist obduracy. But unionist distrust is deepened all the more by the likes of Gerry Adams celebrating the memory of the foot-soldiers of that war of murder and terror and the ideological inspiration for that war (the 1916 Rising), while uttering not a word of compassion, regret or sympathy for the terrible hurt inflicted on the unionist community.
Gerry Adams may have to use rhetoric now that soothes republican anxieties and in the long term maybe he is right to do that. But for him to be surprised that unionist obduracy is hardened as a consequence is a measure of the incomprehension there is on both sides of the sensitivities of the other.