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	Mcguinness Is on Thin Ice When He Seeks Cardinal’s Head on a Plate By Matt Cooper Irish Examiner March 19, 2010 http://www.examiner.ie/opinion/columnists/matt-cooper/mcguinness-is-on-thin-ice-when-he-seeks-cardinals-head-on-a-plate-114847.html SO Martin McGuinness, senior IRA figure, now Sinn Fein’s deputy first minister in the Northern Assembly, felt confident enough on Tuesday to suggest Cardinal Sean Brady should be "considering his position". If ever the cardinal didn’t understand that his position was hanging by a thread, then news of that comment must have hit him like a bullet. That someone with McGuinness’s past feels entitled to pass judgement on Brady’s suitability for office suggests that things for the cardinal must be very bad indeed. Brady’s failures — for which he is being called to account 35 years later — took place in the same era when the IRA was involved in a ruthless campaign of murder and bombings, events that should cause every bit as much outrage as the sexual abuse of children. McGuinness was a senior figure in this IRA campaign and, to his credit considering the failure of other senior political IRA figures to do so, has never denied his involvement. He has expressed regret for many of the things he did, but has not apologised for many of them: he still believes them to have been justified by the circumstances in which he and his colleagues found themselves. By his actions he placed himself above and beyond the law — and the democratic wishes of a majority — for a lengthy period because he regarded his own ideological position as superior. McGuinness served jail time for some of his crimes, although he did not regard them as such but as legitimate political responses to an abuse of power. Is that enough to have allowed him to wipe the slate clean? His own political career with Sinn Fein and with the executive has prospered because enough people believe his commitment to behaving better at present and in the future — and his ability to persuade other people to do the same — is somehow more important than punishing him for the misery he and his ilk inflicted in the past. This makes him confident enough effectively to denounce Brady and to be able to soak up the charges of hypocrisy that should be hurled his way. That Brady has committed his organisation — the Catholic church in Ireland — to a better future in dealing with its paedophiles doesn’t seem to cut it with the public in the same way that Sinn Fein’s Road to Damascus-style conversion to peace does. What makes McGuinness’s comments even more interesting is the position of his party leader, Gerry Adams. There are two reasons for this: the Sinn Fein leader’s continued denial that he was ever a member of the IRA, let alone one of its senior commanders, and the way Adams (and Sinn Fein) handled their knowledge of allegations of serious sexual abuse and rape of a child by Liam Adams, brother of the party leader. Almost everyone involved in Northern politics believes Adams was a senior IRA figure — as well as its most articulate apologist — and that it would have been impossible for him to have been Sinn Fein’s leader without having proven his credentials as an IRA activist. Adams continues to deny this and bridles whenever he is asked about his IRA past, as I have discovered during a number of live interviews with him in which I have raised the subject. Nearly a decade ago the journalist Ed Moloney produced an acclaimed book called A Secret History of the IRA. In it he detailed Adams’s involvement with the IRA’s Belfast brigade as its leader during its murderous bombing campaign of the early and mid 1970s. As his editor at The Sunday Tribune I agreed to serialise extracts from the book. This led to a phone call to my office in the days before publication asking if I could meet McGuinness for a coffee in the Shelbourne Hotel. No agenda was set but the reason for the conversation was clear to both of us. I went to meet him and an associate and we spent an hour discussing the latest developments in the peace process which were at a "delicate place", as usual. The conversation was cordial and engaging, but mid way through McGuinness fixed his gaze on me and — without mentioning the book — said "Gerry Adams was never a member of the IRA you know". I replied that I believed him to have been based on the authority of what I’d read and what I’d heard from others. Message delivered and not expanded upon, McGuinness returned to the general conversation. We published the extract about Adams’s involvement in the IRA the following Sunday and predictably, after denials, the controversy passed. Maybe Adams has been telling the truth about his IRA involvement (or non-involvement) all along. But it is more likely he denied it for so long it became impossible for him to admit that he had been lying all along. More recently, Adams has been confronted by allegations that, despite his claim to have done so, he did not act with sufficient speed or strength against his brother Liam when he discovered that, again allegedly, Liam had raped his own daughter. Adams insisted the RUC was alerted, which is remarkable given that it was more than 20 years ago, at a time when anyone with republican connections was most reluctant to have anything to do with the police, irrespective of the circumstances. But, more tellingly, the Sunday Tribune has published detailed evidence that Liam Adams continued to operate prominently within Sinn Fein, having been first spirited to the US for a spell. The leader has claimed he did not know what his brother was doing within Sinn Fein and so therefore could not have approved of it. ADAMS is on stronger ground than Brady because of his claim that the police were alerted to the allegations. However, the way his brother moved around various parts of Sinn Fein, north and south, bears striking resemblance to the way the Catholic church in Ireland moved its errant members around from parish to parish. Whatever the truth of what happened, and that remains to be established if it can be, Adams must be tarred as much by his handling of this situation as Brady is by his involvement in the internal church investigation into Brendan Smyth’s appalling crimes. So what was McGuinness at when he made his intervention, from Washington, last Tuesday? Did he not realise he was bringing attention, albeit perhaps inadvertently, to the past of many former IRA activists who are prominent in politics now, including himself? There is a school of thought that if Sinn Fein is to prosper it has to cut its ties to those fighters of the past. If the party is to progress further politically, south of the border at least, it may need leadership and candidates who are not tainted by the public’s knowledge of what they did in the past. Was McGuinness signalling by proxy that perhaps Adams needs to be considering his own position, even if that would bring his own future into doubt? McGuinness, who says he’s a Catholic, is entitled to his beliefs and to state them, but if he is judging the cardinal, then perhaps he should consider just how well he and his colleagues, through their actions, lived up to their responsibilities both to the state they profess to love and to their faith. The Last Word with Matt Cooper is broadcast on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm. He can be contacted on twitter at cooper_m
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