Thirty years on, Jonathan Ganesh still dreams about the Algerian man, Zaoui Berezag, who had gone to South Quay Plaza in London’s Docklands on February 9th, 1996 to clean offices in the Midlands Bank.
After finishing his work, Berezag was sitting in his car outside a newsagent’s shop. Also next to the shop was a parked truck containing a bomb left by the IRA. It exploded at 7.01pm.
“I thought he was dead. His brain was hanging out, his skull had gone,” Ganesh remembers, speaking during a break on a night shift in the London hospital where he now works as a psychotherapist.
Berezag, who was left brain-damaged, blind and paralysed, needed round-the-clock care at home for 20 years from his wife, Gemma, and other family members, before dying in a nursing home in 2018.
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Ganesh was badly injured in the explosion, which ended the 1994 IRA ceasefire. The blast killed his friends Inam Ul-Haq Bashir and John Jeffries. More than 100 people were injured, many seriously.
On Monday, Ganesh and John Clark, who was injured in the IRA’s 1973 bombing of the Old Bailey in London, and Barry Laycock, who was injured in the IRA’s 1996 bombing of the Arndale Shopping Centre in Manchester, are taking a civil case at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
Seeking £1 in nominal damages, the three will argue that the former president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, “acted with others in furtherance of a common design to bomb the British mainland”.
The men’s lawyers will argue that the now 77-year-old Adams, a former TD and MP, was “directly responsible” in a variety of roles within the IRA for the decisions to plant the bombs.
The three had wanted to sue him as a representative of the IRA, but two years ago British judge Mark Swift ruled that out, saying the IRA was not “a legal entity”, although he allowed the claims made against Adams personally to continue.
The legal action, which began in 2022, was prompted by the decision of the Conservative government to introduce legacy legislation that would have blocked all legal actions relating to incidents in the Troubles, Northern Ireland’s three-decade conflict.
The legislation was largely intended by the Conservatives to end cases against soldiers and police officers, but Ganesh and his fellow claimants were spurred into action when they realised that it would also cover republicans.
Since then, the three have raised nearly £110,000 (€126,000) to pay for the case.
“There were a few large donations, but most of the money has come in fivers, some in twos and threes. Some in euros too,” says Ganesh.
Two years ago, Adams lost an application to have the three pay his legal costs if he wins. Usually, losers pay the winner’s costs, but the judge ruled against Adams, effectively granting the three a safety net.
Adams has always denied ever having been a member of the IRA and has never been convicted of IRA membership. He was charged with the offence in 1977, but the case was dropped months later because of insufficient evidence.
In 2014, he was held for four days by the Police Service of Northern Ireland on the back of claims made in the Boston College tapes by deceased IRA members Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price.
The two had parted ways with Adams over ending the IRA’s campaign long before they died in 2008 and 2013 respectively. They had alleged that Adams was involved in the 1972 kidnapping and murder of Belfast widow and mother of 10 Jean McConville.
The four days of questioning were condemned by Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness as “political policing”. Later, the Public Prosecution Service in Belfast said there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution as it considered the Hughes/Price allegations to be hearsay.
In 1983 Adams threatened to sue The Irish Times for “the monstrous libel” of describing him as “Provisional IRA vice-president” instead of “Provisional Sinn Féin vice-president”. His solicitors complained of what they considered to be a grossly unfounded libel; they claimed he was not then – and never had been – a member of the IRA and that their client had suffered a “grave injury” to his character.
That same year, Adams complained strongly over an edition of ITV’s World In Action called The Honourable Member for Belfast West, which alleged that he had become “the shogun” of the republican movement.
He has challenged public assertions that he was an IRA member many times since, unlike the late McGuinness, his long-time republican colleague, though McGuinness was convicted of IRA membership.
Last year, Adams denied under oath in a High Court defamation action in Dublin that he was a member of the IRA, when he sued the BBC over claims made in its Spotlight programme that he had authorised the killing of IRA informer Denis Donaldson in 2006.
He won that case, and was awarded €100,000 in damages, which he split between Unicef, GAA clubs, and homelessness and suicide prevention organisations in Belfast, and a republican prisoners’ support group.
Although it had the opportunity, the BBC did not appeal the verdict.
Adams’s long-time denial of IRA membership is regarded by many in the republican community – loosely defined – as being a slightly unfortunate, uncomfortable, but nevertheless pragmatic action.
Others are less forgiving, however.
Former president of republican Sinn Féin (RSF) Des Dalton said Adams has “carefully constructed a narrative over a long number of years”, but has now “painted himself into a corner”.
Saying that Adams suffers from “a complete lack of credibility”, Dalton, who led RSF from 2009 to 2018, but is no longer a member, told The Irish Times: “It’s quite insulting to a lot of people who did take part in the struggle.
“In the beginning, there was a practical element to all of this, I suppose. But Ruairí Ó Brádaigh [a former president of republican Sinn Féin] had a very simple way of dealing with questions like that, saying: ‘We do not discuss those matters.’ He could have done the same,” Dalton says of Adams.
The history of the Troubles shows Adams’s associations, argues Dalton, pointing to the former Sinn Féin president’s presence at the 1972 Cheyne Walk talks in London with Northern Ireland secretary Willie Whitelaw, when an IRA delegation travelled to meet British government officials.
Seán Mac Stiofáin, the then IRA chief of staff, made clear that an IRA delegation went to Cheyne Walk: “Seán Ó Bradaigh, Sinn Féin’s director of publicity, wanted to go and was firmly told no,” Dalton recalls.
The case that begins on Monday before Judge Mark Swift will hear testimony from up to 14 witnesses.
The list includes at least one former member of the IRA, and possibly two. Two witnesses have been given court-ordered anonymity, though this was challenged by Adams’s counsel, Edward Craven KC.
He argued that there was no evidence of any real, or immediate risk to life, or serious harm if they were identified, adding that one of the two – known as Witness B – has long commented publicly on matters concerning Northern Ireland.
If they had “held genuine and objectively well-founded fears for their safety if their identities were to become public” that would have been clear from their witness statements, the lawyer argued, unsuccessfully.
The case will involve Adams making his first appearance in a London court, when he will likely face the former director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, Max Hill KC.
The case matters greatly to Adams, who has carefully nurtured his image and reputation, especially in the United States where he remains his party’s single biggest draw when it raises funds there.
Addressing an Irish-American audience last month in a column in the New York-based Irish Echo, he said the claim now being taken by Ganesh, Laycock and Clark was “unorthodox”.
“I regret all the deaths and injuries. People are entitled to use the law. However, this case is brought decades after these incidents and decades after the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to us all,” Adams wrote.
A number of former British army and RUC/PSNI witnesses “will give hearsay evidence that because I was a senior republican during the conflict I must be responsible for these specific events,” he wrote.
“I had no direct or indirect involvement in these explosions and I will robustly challenge the unsubstantiated hearsay statements that are the mainstay of the claimants’ case.”
Just days before the case begins, the documentary A Ballymurphy Man, which traces Adams’s life and career – and which he co-operated in the making of over five years – will be released on various streaming services.
Asked about the likely consequences of the case, Prof Donnacha Ó Beacháin, of DCU, said historians operated “on the working assumption” that Adams had been a member of the IRA.
A court ruling laying that down in tablets of legal stone could “embolden” some historians and writers to strengthen their findings on Adams in future histories of The Troubles, he said.
If Adams wins, the victory will, for republicans, join last year’s legal victory against the BBC, which, Adams claimed afterwards, had “put manners” on an organisation that “upholds the ethos of the British state in Ireland”.
If he loses, his supporters will likely argue that no Irish republican could have expected justice in a British court from a British judge.
Perhaps rehearsing this line, Adams wrote in his New York column: “This civil action has support from British forces veterans, English Tories, the DUP, other unionist parties and elements of the Loyal Orders.”
However, the international publicity a defeat would bring would place both Adams and Sinn Féin on the back foot and raise the prospect that others might follow the lead of Ganesh, Clark and Laycock.
For Des Dalton, however, there is an element of weariness about it all.
“To be honest, I had not realised that the case was beginning next week. It’s just another occasion where Gerry Adams says he wasn’t in the IRA,” he said.
“His attitude is almost Orwellian, but the accepted version of history matters to him, and to Sinn Féin. That’s what all of this is about: winning the battle of history of The Troubles.”
For Ganesh, a distant relation of Éamon de Valera through his Bruree, Co Limerick-born mother, Patricia Coll, the case is being taken for all those no longer able to have their voices heard.
“Those killed, those who died in pain with their injuries, those who committed suicide – and there have been more of those than people know. Too many people, too much pain,” he said.
“It’s been a very long journey. It has not been easy for us, not been easy at all. Many people thought we wouldn’t be able to get this far. But it was very important that we did.”
