Why Gerry Adams is reviled at home but revered abroad

Even in far-off Washington DC for the St Patrick's Day celebrations, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams couldn't escape the front pages of the Irish newspapers and a lot of the coverage surrounding his visit was negative.

There were reports he had been “snubbed” by the US state department and Adams suggested the department had “not been helpful”.

Still, he got to sit beside Enda Kenny at the speaker’s lunch which I’m sure was a delight to both of them.

There is a saying that all is fair in love and war. And given that politics is just a more sophisticated version of war, should we be surprised at the deluge of criticism and abuse which has recently descended on Sinn Féin and Adams in particular?

It has been a very long time indeed, since I read anything positive or even balanced about Adams in the Irish media. The most recent piece was Fintan O'Toole's admission in The Irish Times that Sinn Féin in power was unlikely to crash the economy as so many siren voices, including Goldman Sachs, the international investment group, are predicting.

You might say politicians shouldn't expect to be liked. But the level of abuse directed against the president of Sinn Féin seems wildly overdone. It is hard to think of any recent Irish political figure who has attracted such opprobrium apart perhaps from Éamon de Valera and Charles Haughey. And even Mr Haughey had his media supporters while de Valera was compelled to set up his own newspaper, the sorely missed Irish Press, in effort to get his views across.

The interesting thing is that this hostility is largely an Irish phenomenon. I don’t detect the same level of antagonism in the British or European or US media.

Held in high esteem

Of course, you could argue that we know Adams better than the others do. But political figures such as

Tony Blair

,

Jonathan Powell

and

Bill Clinton

who worked closely with Adams have spoken warmly about him. And he is certainly held in high esteem by the ANC who conferred on him the honour of being a pall bearer at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. So how do we account for this situation? Adams’s personality might have something to do with it. He has been described as cold and arrogant and he certainly doesn’t go out of his way to woo journalists. His alleged paramilitary past is obviously a factor, although he has consistently denied membership of the IRA. So is the fact that he is a northerner, who in some people’s eyes has no business interfering in politics down here. Although the plain people of

Louth

have had no difficulty putting him top of the poll in recent elections.

The antagonism

My own guess is that the antagonism is down to fear. The hostility towards Adams seems to have gone into overdrive since the last local and European elections when Sinn Féin won seats in all four European constituencies and secured 15.3 per cent of the votes in the local elections.

The established parties in the Republic, particularly Fianna Fáil and Labour are right to be afraid. On current projections, Sinn Féin is on course to displace Fianna Fáil as the real standard bearer of the Republic, while the party continues to hoover up Labour voters in working-class areas of Dublin and other major cities. And on past performance in Northern Ireland, once Sinn Féin manages to gain a foothold, it is very difficult to dislodge them.

So is there nothing positive to be said for Adams?

Not only did he persuade his party to embrace democratic politics but also to accept an internal settlement when the IRA had been fighting for over 30 years for an all-Ireland republic. But he also managed an extraordinary feat. He persuaded the IRA, not just to accept a ceasefire and take the democratic road but to decommission its weapons. This was something that had never been done before.

The republicans, after the Civil War of 1922 -1923 dumped their weapons for use at a possible future date. The same thing occurred after the 1956 IRA Border campaign.

Not even the Official IRA, long regarded by many in the media as the doves of the paramilitary world, went so far as to decommission its weapons. This achievement took considerable energy, skill and above all, courage.

As a result, Adams is reviled as a traitor by dissident republicans who have long held as an article of faith that politics is a trap and the only way to gain their objectives is through continued armed struggle. If Adams were to fail in his political project, no one would be more delighted than those same dissidents who detest him with a venom that few politicians in the Republic could muster. It would consolidate their view that politics is a waste of time and only violence can achieve results.

Sometimes in politics you should be careful what you wish for. Eugene McEldowney is a former Irish Times journalist