The true significance of the role played by Gerry Adams in the IRA did not become clear until he was arrested in 1973 alongside leading IRA figures, a former British army officer has told a UK court.
The retired officer, testifying from behind a screen and identified only as witness A, was giving evidence on the third day of the civil action against Adams in the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
The case is being taken by three victims of IRA bombings in England: John Clark, who was injured in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing; Jonathan Ganes, who was hurt in the 1996 London docklands bombing; and Barry Laycock, who was left with life-changing injuries from the Manchester Arndale 1996 bombing.
They are seeking damages of £1 from Adams and claim he was a member of the Provisional IRA, which he has always denied, and that he was a controlling force behind the bombings.
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Witness A told the court that Adams was among a group arrested in a raid on a home in the Lower Falls area of Belfast in July 1973.
The group, which included leading IRA member Brendan Hughes, was brought to a nearby RUC station where Adams gave a false name.
The former British soldier said he identified Adams even though they only had one photograph of him and quickly realised Adams was a more significant IRA figure than previously realised.
Accusing witness A of “doubtful recollection”, one of Adams’s legal team, James Robottom, said the story of the arrest bore a remarkable similarity to an arrest of Adams the previous year that later became part of the recent “Say Nothing” series about Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
“I resent the inference that I am making this up,” said the former officer, who joined the British army in 1968 and served until 2004.
Witness A said during one tour in Northern Ireland he had maintained “the integrity of intelligence files” but acknowledged that he “did not collect” intelligence and had not drawn on any original intelligence records linking Adams directly to the IRA when preparing his statement for the claimants in the case against him.
Former British army colonel Richard Kemp also rejected a charge that he also had “no direct evidence” that linked Adams to IRA membership, or to any bombings.
His judgment about Adams was based on long years of sight of intelligence reports, which would have been corrected over time if the allegation that he played a senior IRA role was wrong.
Shane Paul O’Doherty, who ran a letter-bombing campaign for the IRA in the 1970s, told the court that the last IRA member to testify against a senior IRA figure was stabbed in the face and eyes.
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O’Doherty said he had expected a number of other former IRA members to give evidence in the case against Adams – without naming them in court – but later discovered he would be the only one.
O’Doherty said Eamon Collins was the last IRA man to give evidence in a civil case against a senior IRA figure and he was killed eight months after he testified in a libel case taken by Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy in 1999 against The Sunday Times after it named him as the head of the IRA’s northern command.
O’Doherty, giving evidence for a second day, insisted that neither Adams, nor anyone in Sinn Féin, nor anyone in the IRA, had ever questioned any detail he has published about the IRA in nearly a decade of blogging.
However, he acknowledged that he had never met Adams during his time in the IRA or afterwards, and did not have direct evidence that the former MP and TD had been a member.
O’Doherty rejected the assertion of Adams’s lawyer Edward Craven that he had offered to give evidence in the civil action because he wanted to heighten his profile.
“I am here to support victims. I am not getting anything out of this; there is no other benefit for me,” said O’Doherty.
He said he had never written specifically about Adams’s role in the IRA until he heard him say in a Sky News interview that republicans would be honest with victims, but had then not followed through on it.
The former Sinn Féin leader had not given “a smidgen of the truth” about his involvement in the Troubles.
By contrast, O’Doherty, who served 14 years of 30 concurrent life sentences for the 1976 letter-bomb campaign that injured 12 people, said he had met victims and shown repentance.
In his witness statement, O’Doherty described Adams as “suffering from the ‘last man standing’ syndrome”, by which he meant that since so many IRA leaders were now dead, “he alone bears both the prize and the burden” of being the last prominent IRA leader “to bear witness to its long and horrible campaign”.
The case continues.
