It’s time for Gerry Adams to bow out, and take his fictional counterpart with him
Opinion: Sinn Féin is now a significant, and in many ways constructive, part of the democratic process
Gerry Adams has had ample opportunity to end this corrosive fiction. There is now little hope that he will ever do so. He should withdraw gracefully and take Joe McGuigan with him. Photograph: Gareth Chaney/Collins
One of the main political leaders in Ireland is Joe McGuigan. In March 1972, when Gerry Adams was arrested and interrogated at Palace barracks in Belfast, he insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity. As he recounted in his autobiography, Before the Dawn, “I had seized upon the device of refusing to admit I was Gerry Adams as a means of combating my interrogation. By continuing to assert that I was Joe McGuigan, I reasoned that I would thwart the interrogation by bogging it down on this issue”.
More than 40 years later, Sinn Féin is still led by a man who refuses to admit he is Gerry Adams. Joe McGuigan is a remarkable man. He may, indeed, be unique. In the maelstrom of west Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Joe stood out as a young man of infinite patience and pacific resolve. While pretty much every other young man was drawn into some act of affray, Joe, as they might put it Belfast, never done nothing.