In 1987, 14-year-old Aine Adams told her Irish Uncle Gerry, that his brother, her father Liam had abused her since she was four years old. He said he believed her. "She was always a very good wee girl; I just couldn't imagine a child like her making up such a serious allegation," he said
The British controlled media in Ireland, have been praising Adams's response, of talking about his own father's abuse when they were children. The important questions from a few genuine journalists, as to what exactly he has done for his niece or to protect other potential victims, in his capacity as President of Sinn Fein and Westminster MP, so far have produced nothing noteworthy.
From evidence in the public domain so far, for 20 odd years, he did almost nothing, until Aine forced the issue by going public. She informed Adams she had proven that there was a prima facie case to answer by agreeing to a police medical examination. Instead of support, Aine was pressed to stop using the British police. In 1995, Adams insisted that all abused Catholic boys and girls should refuse to talk to the RUC because the authorities used "these issues for their own militaristic ends".
It was fair to assume on this basis, that the republican movement under Adams would do what it traditionally always did, provide armed volunteers to watch suspected paedophiles, to protect boys and girls of West Belfast, Dundalk and all republican areas. He never delivered on his promise to Aine, though. Liam Adams left Belfast and went to work as a youth worker, in republican Dundalk and then back to republican Belfast's Clonard Monastery to work with youth again.
Adams said he informed the monastery about his brother. The Clonard Youth Centre informed the Irish Times it couldn't find any record of his warning. Managers at the youth centre in Dundalk said, that neither Gerry Adams nor the local Sinn Fein branch, of which Liam was chairperson, bothered to tell any of them that he should not be working with children. When Liam Adams remarried a photographer captured a beaming Gerry at the wedding.
Aine now believed that Adams wanted to shut her up and turn his "brother into the victim". As the scandal threatened Adams's political career, most of the British controlled media in Ireland tried to potray him as a victim as well. As a result the Irish Catholic middle class praised Adams. "Shut your gob," cried one. "Gerry Adams is a good man. This is a family matter and should be dealt with inside the family."
This all comes in the wake of the resignation of 5 Bishops for exactly the same behaviour as Gerry Adams. A 60 million inquiry into child abuse that produced a huge documented account, of more than 60 years of systemic state and church savagery, of rape and abuse. A multi billion award to victims paid by Irish taxpayers not the hugely wealthy Church.
Keeping child abuse under cover has seriously damaged Irish Catholicism but like Adams it still uses language of victimhood and persecution to deflect critical questions for child protection in ireland. Despite all the documente pain, time, effort and money the country is till in almost total denial of the scale of child rape in Ireland. The 35,000 victims so far identified is only the tip of the iceberg and the hardening attitudes are similar to the attitudes of the Catholic middle class in Hitler's Holocaust Europe, approval with silence and denial.
A few ethical journalists are criticising Adams for failing to protect children and accuse him of enabling and being an accomplice to further possible abuse with a cover up. Adams and McGuinness's party has a propaganda machine at work not just covering up child rape but also covering up the fact that the British police and army riddled their party with informers and double agents during the long war. While 5 bishops may resign, Adams remains totally oblivious to the seriousness of the matter.
Adams and McGuinness believe themselves with the support of the British controlled media in Ireland, immune from any negative comment because they accepted a power-sharing agreement that had been on the table since the Sunningdale talks of 1973. Thousands of dead in the intervening years disregarded, they remain the media's darlings.
The brutalisation of generations of working-class children and youth has produced the spectacle of Adams and McGuinness, the worst elements of Irish nationalism, embracing Unionist party policy, and dividing personal power between them. Sunningdale promised republicans a political platform to achieve justice. Adams and McGuinness hijacked that platform for their own personal advancement, to raise their own profile and then smother criticisms, such as child rape by members of their party and gain personal power and wealth on the backs of the ultimate sacrifices of the many, in another 30 years of a liberation struggle that followed the agreement.
British police now warn that support for republican groups is growing. A new generation says, that Adams and McGuinness betrayed the cause of irish freedom and that they will achieve liberation. The refusal of corrupted politicians and media in Ireland in general, to tell the real story of Adams and McGuinness, permits in the meantime, the injustices and barbarity of endemic child abuse to continue. It will delay the day of liberation and protection of Ireland's most vulnerable, from the savagery of occupation and perversions of sociopathic collaborators.
