Gerry Adams made his way carefully, grasping a timber rail, to get from the body of court No. 20, through a narrow aisle, to the witness box, shortly after 10am in the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Wednesday.
Once there, he took off his jacket, fiddled with the cap of a bottle of water, before he swore “to Almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” in his evidence.
He quickly offered a “very Happy St Patrick’s Day” to Judge Jonathan Swift, and though March 17th did not mean quite as much to the slightly-surprised High Court judge as it did to the many Irish in the court, he took the greeting warmly.
Adams’ counsel, Edward Creavan, began by taking him on a tour of his background, beginning with his joining Sinn Féin – then an proscribed organisation in Northern Ireland – in 1964.
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He was, he said, “only a lad”, who had lost his job at a pub in a loyalist district because he looked “for the union rate”, even though the Protestant locals had treated him decently throughout his time behind the counter.
Learning quickly the reality of 1960s Northern Ireland, he said he gave up school, and the hope of university to become a political activist – something which he has remained since, but never an IRA member.
Looking down the court, Adams said he had been “extremely moved” to hear the testimony last week of one of the claimants, Barry Laycock, left with injuries from the Manchester Arndale bomb in 1996.
Sitting three rows back, Laycock, unable to work since he was injured in June 1996 and who takes daily morphine to help kill the pain, sat glacially unmoved, his hand under his chin.
[ Gerry Adams ‘pushed’ IRA into attacks in England, UK court toldOpens in new window ]
Then began hours of jousting between Adams and Max Hill, the former British director of public prosecutions, who is now acting as barrister for Laycock and his two fellow claimants, John Clark and Jonathan Ganesh.
Throughout, Hill sought to present Adams’ history as one of an endless series of contradictions, where he simultaneously denied that he was a senior IRA figure, but did things only a senior IRA figure could do.
Adams in turn needled Hill frequently, criticising the barrister’s references to “the mainland”, or expressing annoyance that Hill was speaking over him, or insisting on reading a greater part of documents before him.
The black beret worn by Adams as part of an honour guard for a killed IRA volunteer in Belfast in 1972 that has featured throughout the case – now in its sixth day of hearing – appeared again.
Wearing such a beret then meant the wearer was an IRA volunteer, said Hill. Nonsense, argued Adams, it was a republican mark of respect and, and anyway, “even Benny Hill wore a beret”, adding that he had answered the question “at least 10 times”.
Frequently, Adams said he struggled to read some of the papers shown to him, partly because of a lack of light. The judge offered him a desk lamp to bring light where there was darkness.
On one occasion, he said he had difficulty recognising a photograph of himself published under a headline, “The Most Wanted Man in Ulster” by the Daily Mirror in 1973.
In another, he was slow to recognise senior IRA figure, Martin Meehan in a photograph wrongly dated by the BBC.
“That’s the BBC for you,” said Adams, drily, prompting a peal of laughter in the court from actor, Lisa Dwan.
“I like English people; I just don’t like the ones who come in uniform, or in the dark. I don’t see why we cannot work together on many issues of common interest to the people who live here,” Adams continued.
Throughout, the former Sinn Féin leader insisted that he was not, and had never been a member of the IRA, leaving him unable to be able to confirm the status of Martin McGuinness’ IRA membership, or that of former Kerry TD Martin Ferris.
The history of the famous 1972 Cheyne Walk talks in Chelsea, long understood to have been a meeting between the British government and the IRA delegation, including Adams, was wrong, he said.
Hill charged that Seán Mac Stíofáin, the IRA chief of staff at the time, insisted in his memoirs, and afterwards that everybody there, including Adams, were part of an IRA delegation.
Not so, said Adams.
Reeling off the names of those there, including McGuinness, Adams said they were all Sinn Féin representatives, including Dáithí Ó Conaill and Ivor Bell. Nobody was more surprised than himself to have been included, Adams told Hill.
Rejecting this version of events, Hill said Conservative politician Willie Whitelaw was the man who had sat across the table from Adams in Cheyne Walk as Northern Ireland secretary.
A decade later, Whitelaw was the home secretary who issued an exclusion order preventing Adams travelling to Britain. “He was clear in ’72 that you were in the IRA, and he was clear in ’82 that you ran the IRA,” said Hill.
