An Irish Eye

by Gerry Adams

The recent years covered by this unique book have seen momentous developments in Irish republicanism and in the politics of Ireland as a whole. From the IRA decision in 2005 to formally end its armed campaign and to put its arms beyond use to the Sinn Féin decision in January 2007 to support the policing and justice system, unparralleled historic change has taken place.

In An Irish Eye , Adams brings to life his own perspective to bear on these developments in articles and speeches he has written as events unfolded. An accomplished writer as well as polical leader, he describes events, in which he has played such a significant role with insight, passion and humour. He gives the reader an unrivalled insight into pivotal movements of our recent history, and he takes the reader behind the scenes to witness events that continue to shape Irish society today.

Including as it does Adams' historical appeal to the IRA and his call on Sinn Féin to support the policing and justice system, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Irish politics now.

It is not just about the peace process, including observations about visits to the Basque country, the Middle East, South Africa and the USA. He also comments on the Celtic Tiger and other aspects of life in Ireland today; he takes a verbal poke at the establishment; he includes a handful of poems he has written in Irish, and he gives us a peak as some personal and humorous episodes as well as the more serious life and death issues.

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Gerard "Gerry" Adams, MLA, MP (Irish: Gearóid Mac Ádhaimh; born 6 October 1948) is an Irish republican politician and abstentionist Westminster Member of Parliament for Belfast West. He is the president of Sinn Féin, the political party at the top of the latest North of Ireland election polls amidst a three-way split in the traditionally dominant unionist vote. Sinn Féin is the second largest party in the Northern Assembly.

From the late 1980s onwards, Adams has been an important figure in Ireland's peace process, initially following contact by the then Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume and subsequently with the Irish and British governments and then other parties. In 2005, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) indicated that its armed campaign was over and that it is now exclusively committed to democratic politics. Under Adams, Sinn Féin changed its traditional policy of abstentionism towards Oireachtas Éireann, the parliament of Ireland, in 1986 and later took seats in the power-sharing Northern Assembly. However, Sinn Féin retains a policy of abstentionism towards the Westminster Parliament.

Reviews

[cindabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The interrogation techniques that were used following the internment swoops in the North of Ireland in 1971 were taught to the RUC by British military officers. Someone authorised this. The first internment swoops ‘Operation Demetrius’ saw hundreds of people systematically beaten and forced to run the gauntlet of war dogs, batons and boots. Some were stripped naked and had black hessian bags placed over their heads... as the men were spread eagled against the wall, their legs were kicked out from under them. They were beaten with batons and fists on the testicles and kidneys and kicked between the legs. Radiators and electric fires were placed under them as they were stretched over benches. Arms were twisted, fingers were twisted, ribs were pummelled, objects were shoved up the anus, they were burned with matches and treated to games of Russian roulette. Some were taken up in helicopters and flung out, believing that they were high in the sky. All the time they were hooded, handcuffed and subject to a high pitched unrelenting noise.

This was later described as sensory deprivation. It went on for days. During this process, some of them were photographed in the nude. And although these cases ended up in Europe and the British government paid thousands in compensation, it didn't stop the torture and ill treatment of detainees. It just made the British government and its military and intelligence agencies more careful about how they carried it out and ensured they changed the laws to protect torturers and make it very difficult to expose the guilty.’

‘The issue of collusion. That is the administrative practice by which British government agencies recruited, trained, supplied information to, protected and armed Unionist death squads to kill opponents and civilians. Successive British governments have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up the involvement of their military and intelligence and police agencies in the murder of civilians. The most famous of these cases is of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane.’

Raymond McCord Senior alleges that his son was killed because he was in possession of a holdall containing cannabis belonging to the UVF in Mount Vernon, a housing estate in North Belfast. He was murdered to prevent the UVF command in the Shankhill Road from finding out about this. The murder was ordered, it is claimed, by the head of the Mount Vernon UVF who was in prison at the time, and it is claimed, is a Special Branch agent. Another informer was present during the killing. One of these men has allegedly been involved in a number of killings while working for the Special Branch. Raymond McCord Senior says that he has been told this by a police officer who said ‘until now, this agent was considered to be too valuable to be charged with any of these killings’. ‘

[This alleged link between state knowledge of drugs distribution is also discussed in relation to Afghanistan. After the 1992 fall of the PDP Marxist government in Afghanistan, MIchael Parenti wites in The Terrorism Trap... ‘The mujahedeen took over Afghanistan... the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin labs across Afghanistan. ‘Within 2 years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of heroin on American streets.’ In addition, in the book A Fortune Teller Told Me, 'Several times since 1980 the drug lord Khun Sa had made the West, particularly the US, an offer to sell or destroy his entire crop of opium. In return he asked for economic aid of $300 million over 6 years' and 'It was the CIA who after Mao’s victory helped the remnants of the Kuomintang army to settle in Burma and finance itself by growing opium'.

Dostoyevsky in House of the Dead discusses the use of spies in the Siberian prison and says; ‘far from hating spies or keeping apart from them, the prisoners often make friends of them...[the prisoner who was also a spy] used to tell [his superior] everything that happened in the convict prison and this was naturally carried back to the servant's master]

‘Those agencies are dependant on informers and agents. They are generally people who have been compromised, or cajoled, blackmailed, threatened or bribed into working for them...in most cases, agents or informers are unfortunate creatures who live their lives in a twilight zone, spying on their friends, family members, neighbours, workmates and comrades...In many cases, when they have outlived their usefulness to their handlers, they are discarded. During the armed conflict many were shot dead.’

‘The IRA could not have survived, much less much less fought to a standstill a significantly superior military force, without the solid and steady support of families and friends, and the wider endorsement of the local community’.

‘the discovery... that the home of a member of my staff had been bugged’.

‘The use by British forces of other ‘friendly forces’ to kill the enemy or ‘terrorise the terrorists’ has its roots in modern times in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus and in almost 50 counter insurgency wars fought by the British governments in the 1950s and 1960s.’

‘we want the EU to prioritize the elimination of poverty within and beyond its borders...the European Union must conduct itself in a globally responsible way. This means fair trade has to prevail over free trade and we should all campaign for the human rights proofing of EU aid and trade policies. The massive EU overspend on the military, currently [2004] at €160 billion, must be challenged.’

‘Nelson Mandela summed it up best when he remarked that ‘there is no easy road to freedom’ and that ‘none of us acting alone can achieve success’. He said ‘We must therefore act together as a united people for the birth of a new world’.

‘The British Army used to poison dogs. You always knew when the Brits were in the neighbourhood by the way the dogs barked. ‘

‘C Desmond Greaves definitive book; Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution... Mellows was one of the most radical and intellectually questioning of the 1916-22 Republican leaders. Greaves’ book gives an incisive insight into the social and class politics which underpinned the Republican split over the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty. The establishment of the Free State Provisional government at that time gave the forces of Irish conservatism and large property a new rallying point when they were made homeless after the destruction by Sinn Fein of John Redmonds Home Rule Party in the 1918 general election. Then they found a new home in Cumann na nGaedheal, later Fine Gael. And in the now Free State.

Liam Fellows...advanced propositions and strategic methods that are generally applicable to national independence struggles and indeed all broad democratic movements everywhere. Much of what he wrote may just as valid today as it was then. For example, words from individuals become attributed to the whole collective’, [such as the case of Mahmoud Abbas the head of the PLO just before the recent war making a ‘tasteless, racist statement that Jews basically deserved the Holocaust because they were involved too much in financial dealings. My [Slavoj Zizek] answer is of course they were involved because they were prohibited to own land...but my point is ...that over 100 Palestinian intellectuals from Israel and West Bank and from United States immediately wrote a letter condemning Abbas for a totally unacceptable antisemitic statement’ (Slavoj Zizek speaking on Novara Media interviewed by Aaron Bastani).]

‘The global death toll resulting from suicide exceeds war and homicide, according to a recent scientific journal (New Scientist, 8 September 2004). The WHO estimates nearly one million people a year take their own lives. Ireland has the second highest incidence of suicide in Europe. It is the biggest killer of young people in our country.

In the US, it is estimated that for every person who takes their own life there are 6 survivors. That means there are hundreds, probably thousands of people in Ireland who have tried to take their own lives. That is a lot of trauma, much of it hidden.’

On a visit to the US, an Irish American activist gave me a small notice which once upon a time could be found in boarding houses across the vast country and indeed in others aswell. It read ‘No Irish need apply’. Many of those who overcame this discrimination endured bad working conditions, low pay and exploitation as they tried to make a life for themselves and their families far from home.

Almost every day, a new horror story emerges around the ill treatment and exploitation of migrant workers in Ireland. The experience of the Irish abroad in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century is now a depressing feature of life for others in twenty-first century Ireland.

The EU Services Directive would allow private companies to undercut public service providers by employing people on the salaries of their country of origin. This would open migrant workers up to even greater levels of exploitation, with no protection, while creating the real prospect of indigenous workers being displaced by migrant workers.

Migrant workers are considered by some elements of Irish business and the Irish government purely in terms of their economic value. They are there to maximise profits and expand business. Their rights and entitlements as human beings are secondary.

Noone should risk setting one group of workers –that is the existing workforce- against another group of migrant workers. Creating divisions between workers runs contrary to everything that James Connolly upheld and ultimately died for. It is at variance with the core trade union principle of solidarity between workers.

The Proclamation promises to cherish all the children of the nation equally. Today despite the unprecedented prosperity in the Irish economy, we have one of the most inequitable societies in the developed world. In this state one in seven children live in poverty. There is a two tier public/private health care system which is grossly unequal.

The Proclamation says the ownership of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland. Successive governments have sold off national resources to powerful multinational corporations. In their Proclamation the ownership of Ireland belongs to Shell. They are also about the business of selling off public or state bodies to their cronies in the public sector.

The almost complete destruction of the Irish language took place as part of a policy decision by the British to eliminate the Gaelic way of life in their first colony. The belief that ‘as the tongue speaketh so the heart thinketh’ decreed that any social or political discourse in Ireland must be in English. Despite this, elements of the Gaelic way of life persisted in many parts of Ireland up to the nineteenth century in one form or another, but back then the language had become the language of the poor, mainly rural and marginal regions.

In Guy Fawkes and his conspirators were castrated, disembowelled alive then hung, drawn and quartered.

In 1305 William Wallace was hanged, cut down while still alive and cut up. He was mutilated and disembowelled and his heart, liver, lungs and entrails were burned in a fire while his body was chopped up and parts sent throughout the kingdom as a warning to others.

Their presence relied on the theft of land; the construction of massive hilltop forts; dugouts hidden on mountainsides, helicopter gunships; troop carriers to ferry heavily armed and armoured troops from location to location, high tech surveillance and monitoring equipment...the weapons of occupation included structured political and economic discrimination, inequality, violence and torture, shoot to kill actions, collusion with Unionist death squads and widespread harassment.