GERRY RIGGED

A Year ago, Gerry Adams’s comrades in the Irish Republican Army exploded a half-ton bomb outside my office in London’s Docklands and scared the bejesus out of me. More to the point, they killed two young men — both, by cruel irony, Muslims — and signaled the end of an 18-month ceasefire. What little Adams has to say about the bomb in Before the Dawn speaks volumes. “As newsflash followed newsflash,” he writes, “as the television pictures of Canary Wharf were shown, and as word of the casualties, and later the two fatalities, emerged, my sadness turned to sorrow as I thought of those who had died and been injured, and for their families.” My sadness turned to sorrow . . . Was tautology ever more barefaced, more shameless, more brazen?

Gerry Adams never apologizes, never explains. In the case of the Docklands bomb he admits that the IRA was responsible — but so does the IRA. That’s the official line. Adams does not condemn the IRA, nor does he express outrage, or demand that the guilty men be brought to justice. As president of Sinn Fein he cannot do that. Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA, which makes the IRA the armed wing of Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein-IRA is a national liberation front. It is committed to ending British rule in Northern Ireland and to the creation of a single socialist state covering all of Ireland.

The nationalists have a case, at least historically. Over the centuries the Protestant English have robbed, beaten, and jailed the Catholic Irish. They have murdered them. They have subjected them to cruel and unusual punishments. Until very recently the Catholics in Northern Ireland were denied full political rights. When Adams was born in West Belfast in 1948 they were still an oppressed minority. In Derry, for example, where the majority was (and is) Catholic, gerrymandering ensured that the town council was run by Protestants. But the Catholics were not as oppressed as Adams would have us believe. It is true, as he says, that many thousands of poor Catholics throughout Northern Ireland had no vote in local elections, because they did not meet the property qualifications; but that was the case too with poor Protestants. The law did not discriminate.

The Adams family was certainly poor. Young Gerry was one of ten children. He knew what it was like to go without, and he makes the most of his disadvantages in Before the Dawn: The book’s opening chapters are a cross between Stand By Me and those gritty English television dramas about working-class life in the industrial north. He writes of “our ma” and “our da” and grubby knees and freckled faces and first confessions (“I said “frig,” Father. Father, I robbed an orchard, once. And me and my friends tied thread to oul’ Ma Doren’s door and we played “kick the door” all night . . .” Penance: one Our Father and three Hail Marys). He lets you know that he loves dogs (not always a good sign) and folk music (always and everywhere a bad sign).

At times he is so transparent as to make you turn away in watery-eyed embarrassment. He recounts how he and his friends once caught a frog. One of his friends suggested that they should stick a straw up its arse and blow it up — the phrase makes you jump — like a football. But our Gerry would have none of it. Why, he took that frog from them right then and there and freed the little critter. On another occasion he shot a rabbit and was almost reduced to tears by its screeching.

You get the drift: Gerry Adams is a man of peace. The Brits — as he insists on calling the English — are the men of violence. The British Army is the brutal and brutalizing arm of the imperial power; there is routine torture of republican suspects; the loyalist Protestants conduct “pogroms” against the nationalist Catholics. In fact, the security forces have sometimes behaved abominably, but you would never guess from reading this book that the IRA had ever fired a shot, except in self-defense. You would never guess that of the 3,210 people killed in terrorist incidents in Northern Ireland since 1969, 2,260 were civilians, and that most of them were killed by republicans. You would never guess that three times as many Catholics have been killed by the IRA as by the Army and police. Adams’s account of the Troubles is so one-sided as to be self-defeating. No honest man with wit enough to turn on a television set could be convinced by it.

That is not to say that the book is wholly without merit. There are powerful passages in it, and grim humor, too. But it is always tendentious, and often pernicious. There is a harrowing chapter on Bobby Sands’s hunger strike in Long Kesh in 1981. Sands was a brave man, a man of principle; he was far from being the cowardly republican of English tabloid fantasy. It is impossible not to be moved by Sands’s death, and Adams serves his friend well.

Yet it won’t do to weep. Sands, who was serving 14 years for bombing a factory, died by his own hand. His suffering was freely chosen. At the time he died — for the supposed right of gunmen and bombers to be treated as political prisoners — Catholics in Northern Ireland enjoyed full civil rights. They were guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of worship. There was nothing to die for — except for the IRA.

Bobby Sands did not die for Ireland; he died, poor sod, for the Irish Republican Army. The IRA, and Sinn Fein along with it, is fixated by death. In a gripping but loathsome passage Adams describes what goes through an IRA sniper’s mind when he shoots a British soldier. As he waits for the Army patrol, the imaginary sniper — at least Adams insists that he is imaginary — asks himself whether it is right to kill. His answer: “It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it was necessary.” Understandably, that line caused much bitterness when the book was published in England last year, but the idea that political killing is sometimes necessary is common to all cultures and all causes.

The IRA’s killings, however, are clearly unnecessary even by terrorism’s own forgiving criteria. Adams’s comrades are killers without a cause. The conflict is now purely sectarian, tribal. There are no human- rights abuses in Northern Ireland, except when the gunmen and kneecappers (republican and loyalist) go to work. To be sure, there is a desire for a united Ireland among the Catholics in the north, but it is not a burning desire. They can wait. They suffer no disadvantages where they are. The border is open. They can live where they choose, and they choose to live in the north. The Ireland Adams wants — united, sovereign, socialist — will never come into being for the simplest of reasons: Nobody wants it.

Stuart Reid is associate editor for comment of the London Sunday Telegraph.