Shortly after 4pm on Wednesday, Gerry Adams’s back lost the battle against the high-backed bench seats in Court No 20 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
The former Sinn Féin leader stood to the side to stretch it out.
Dressed in a three-piece grey suit and striped reddish-purple tie, Adams had clearly struggled for a while before having to move, despite court etiquette directing that no one stands when the judge is sitting.
Looking down from his perch, Mr Justice Jonathan Swift – aptly named for a judge hearing an Irish case – moved his black-rimmed glasses just a smidgen, before recognising that Adams was displaying discomfort, and not disrespect.
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Adams sat beside an old associate, Richard McAuley, and his solicitor, Martin Howe. Behind him sat Kenny Donaldson, who leads the SEFF victims and survivors’ group, representing relatives of many people who died at the hands of the IRA.
On a few occasions, Northern Ireland and the days of the Troubles looked far away from Court No 20, especially when Operation Kenova – the investigation into IRA informer Freddie Scappaticci aka Stakeknife – was mentioned.
One of Adams’s lawyers, James Robottom, was reluctant to describe what Kenova was about, passing on the duty to one witness on Wednesday, British colonel Richard Kemp, who knew what it was about, but could not remember its name.
Former IRA man Shane Paul O’Doherty, who was jailed for an IRA letter-bombing campaign in the 1970s, finished his evidence in the morning session, though he admitted that he had never been in the same room as Adams until Wednesday.
He insisted that Adams’s place on an IRA honour guard in the 1970s, at the Cheyne Walk talks with Northern Ireland secretary Willie Whitelaw in 1972, and the standing Adams enjoys with republicans, shows that he was a member of the IRA – something that Adams himself has always denied.
[ Gerry Adams removed his bulletproof vest before he reached the courtroomOpens in new window ]
O’Doherty had offered help to the three claimants in this case – all survivors of IRA bombings from the 1970s and 1990s – when he first heard about the case, emailing their solicitors. It took 18 months for the solicitors to reply and then only at the urging of London-based Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, he told the court.
The fresh-looking 71-year-old O’Doherty insisted he was not driven by a personal dislike of Adams, but insisted that the latter is suffering “from last-man-standing syndrome”.
In his witness statement, O’Doherty said: “All PIRA [Provisional IRA] volunteers who joined the PIRA in the early 1970s and thereafter were instructed to lie to everyone about their PIRA membership.
“This meant lying to their families, whether to their parents or to their wives and children. No one took this PIRA policy to lying to such an absurd extreme as Adams,” he said.
Many IRA leaders are now dead, leaving Adams “alone to bear both the prize and the burden of being the last prominent PIRA leader to bear witness to the PIRA’s long and horrible campaign of terrorism”.
Gerry Adams was not the only one in court in discomfort on Wednesday.
Barry Laycock, one of the claimants, has taken morphine-strength painkillers to dull his pain every day since he was injured in the 1996 Manchester Arndale bombing.
He looked uncomfortable often during the hearing. There will be a few more difficult days to come in a case that will end next week after Adams gives evidence.
