On an unseasonably sunny Friday afternoon, the Falls Road in west Belfast found itself bathed in golden light.
Out of the sunshine stepped Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Féin leader, who hours earlier had seen a civil case taken against him by three men injured in IRA bombings in England “discontinued”.
This was Adams’s moment in the sun; addressing the reporters clustered on the pavement as Bobby Sands looked down on him from the mural behind, he said he welcomed the claimants’ decision to drop the case.
He said he had attended “out of respect” for them but it “verged on a show trial” and “should never have been brought”, he said. It was “clearly ... an unorthodox and strategically important political case taken for that purpose”.
READ MORE
Standing before the microphones in a blue shirt topped with a padded blue gilet, a pin of the Palestinian flag at his throat, Adams was serious, unsmiling; this was no joyful triumph, his demeanour said, but an occasion for quiet dignity.
“I never claimed this to be a victory,” was his response to one reporter who questioned him about remarks by the claimants’ lawyers that the outcome “does not represent a victory for Mr Adams, but the reverse”.
Adams said he had “nothing but sympathy” for the claimants, and had been “moved” by the testimony of the two men who “told of their own personal difficulties and circumstances within the explosions and following the explosions”.
“Family members of mine have been killed, I’ve been shot myself, so I know what it’s like.”
He was paying his own legal bill – “supported by friends” – because he was “never going to burden the claimants”.
But he thought they had been “badly advised” and asked, “Why did the lawyers decide to take this course of action?”
Barry Laycock, a victim of the 1996 Arndale shopping centre bombing in Manchester, John Clark, injured in the bombing of the Old Bailey in London in 1973, and Jonathan Ganesh, who was caught up in a bombing in the London Docklands in 1996, had sued Adams for £1 in damages, claiming he was a leading member of the Provisional IRA on those dates, including of its army council.
In a statement, Laycock said he was “completely devastated” they had had to drop their case but said they “regard these proceedings as vindication of their position”, and it had been due to costs.
During the two-week trial in London’s high court Adams said he had “no involvement whatsoever” in the bombings and was never a member of the Provisional IRA, with his lawyers claiming the case should be thrown out as an abuse of process.
Adams told reporters that during his two days of evidence he “categorically rejected all of the claims being made”.
“I contested this case and defended myself against the smears and false accusations being levelled against me. I asserted the legitimacy of the republican cause and the right of the people of Ireland to freedom and self-determination. I do so again,” he said, adding that he was “glad to have been one of those who helped bring an end to the conflict”.
