If You Ask Me
by Malachi O' Doherty

If Gerry Adams wasn't the impish genius that he is, he would have asked the IRA to decommission five years ago to fulfil the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Then the executive would have been saved and Sinn Fein would be in office sharing power with the Ulster Unionists and the DUP, though not necessarily in that order.

But he held out until the credibility of his willing partner, David
Trimble, was in tatters and most unionists had rallied around Ian Paisley. Well, it made sense to wait until the hardline Unionists were in the lead since any deal with the more amenable Unionists would have been vulnerable to being overthrown by them later on anyway.

If Gerry Adams wasn't the impish genius that he is, he might have urged decommissioning five years before that when it was first demanded as a precondition of talks by Sir Patrick Mayhew, but then a British government concerned about IRA violence would not have felt the need to get the talks started so urgently once the weapons were gone.

And those talks would not have been understood internationally to be part of a heroic peace process, since peace would have been established. Who knows? - we might still be waiting for talks to finish, perhaps even to start.

If Gerry Adams wasn't the impish genius that he is, he might have called off the IRA campaign even five years earlier than that, say in 1989, when a country sickened by the Enniskillen bomb and that Ballygawley bus bomb was ready for peace, but then Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Britain and the contacts between the government and the IRA weren't very active.

Yes, Peter Brooke would soon be preparing talks with the parties to get Unionists to go to Dublin, but Sinn Fein wouldn't be in those talks at all, though mediators would be giving them the position papers to read. Nothing much for the IRA in that.

And if Gerry Adams wasn't the impish genius that he is he might have
called off the IRA campaign even earlier still, just after the hunger
strikes, with 10 republican prisoners dead and more public sympathy than ever on hand to build a political future on. But soon there would be
that huge gift of weapons from Colonel Gadaffi and how do you stop a war when you have just been rearmed.

If Gerry Adams had called the campaign off in 1975, when the British
were offering talks would he, impish genius that he is, have had enough
to barter with? The SDLP was the larger party of nationalism and he
would have been stuck with holding Gerry Fitt's coat for him. Ruairi O
Bradaigh was president of Sinn Fein. How many votes would he have pulled in? Not many.

And go back five years before that and it's 1970 and the Provisional IRA wants to break with the Officials and launch a revolution, despite
warnings from older wiser heads that it would turn into a pointless
sectarian war that would get nowhere.

But Gerry Adams, despite being the impish genius we know him to be,
thought they were completely wrong and that he could blow away the border. Well he was young and foolish then. It has been a long hard road for him, hasn't it?

If You Ask Me Archive