Gerry Adams’ two days in the witness box in Court No 16 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London drew to an exhausted close shortly before 3.30pm on Wednesday, but big issues are still in contest in the case.
The former president of Sinn Féin is facing a civil suit for £1 damages from three victims of IRA bombings – John Clark in the Old Bailey explosion in 1973, Jonathan Ganesh at Canary Wharf in 1996 and Barry Laycock a few months later in Manchester.
Under legal rules, tort cases for personal injuries in England and Wales should be lodged within three years of the event, but papers in this case – spurred on by the onset of British legacy legislation – were not lodged until May 2022.
Judge Jonathan Swift must decide this point first. If the claims are out of time, then none of the other issues can be ruled upon – and section 33 of the 1980 Limitations Act exemptions are “not rare, but they are not routine, either”, to quote a lawyer.
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Just as significantly, there is the issue of abuse of process in the case, which has been mentioned tangentially throughout the seven days of hearings that have taken place in London this week and last.
Beginning his closing arguments, barrister Edward Craven, for Adams, argued that the true intent of the case was not to win personal damages from the 77-year-old ex-Sinn Féin leader, but rather to see him face a public inquiry for his role during The Troubles.
Such an ambition was clear from the claimants’ campaign to raise money to fight the case, where they told supporters that there had never “been a proper inquiry” into Adams’s role and he had never been “obliged to account” for his actions.
However, this, Craven argued, goes beyond what a British civil court can do. It is obliged to do justice to all parties, but it is not able to carry out “inquisitorial investigations” that go beyond the claim for damages made before it.
“Why are you not applying for a strikeout, you are saying that it is being used for a purpose that applies [to justify a strikeout]. It is a case of abuse, or it is not,” the judge said, if just a little sharply.
The second day of evidence by Adams was a more testing day than the first from barrister, Max Hill, a former British director of public prosecutions who was brought on to the claimants’ team specifically for the task.
He laid heavy stress on Adams’s role as a columnist for An Phoblacht in the 1970s under the pen-name Brownie, though Adams insists that a group of people held in Long Kesh contributed to the column, not just him.
The issue matters because Brownie, twice in columns that were presented to the judge, self-identifies as an IRA volunteer, who “rightly, or wrongly” believed in its campaign of violence.
Craven pointed to issues that have been the subject of discussion among those watching the case – including the lack of witnesses who came to court, or first-hand documents that put Adams “in the room”, as it were.
And the information linking him to the three bombings – as distinct from whether he was an IRA member, or not – is “extremely limited ... bordering on non-existent”, Craven argued.
The key to the judgment could be – with emphasis on the could – whether the judge can, or does, make any distinction between the issue of Adams’s alleged IRA membership and his equally alleged involvement in bombings.
Frankly, a dozen different and partisan opinions have been expressed in the corridors outside the court during breaks, though even the claimants accept that no new “smoking gun” emerged during the trial, or that one was ever going to.
The closing submissions begun by Craven will continue in London on Thursday, though it is likely to be several months before the judge will finally adjudicate on the matters that have been put before him.
