Gerry Adams, the former president of Sinn Féin, entered the witness box for a second week this week in his defamation case against the BBC.
During his testimony in the High Court, Adams argued that the counsel for the British broadcaster, Paul Gallagher SC, was trying to convince the jury he had “no reputation, that my reputation is useless”.
Adams told the court that Gallagher was telling the “good people” of the jury that because he had no reputation, the BBC Northern Ireland programme Spotlight could “say whatever they like about me, and I can have no redress”.
The former politician is seeking damages arising from a 2016 Spotlight programme entitled A Spy in the IRA over a claim – which Adams denies – that he sanctioned the murder of Denis Donaldson in 2006 after Donaldson, who worked in the Sinn Féin office in Stormont, was exposed as an informer for the British security services.
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Adams is alleging the claim, from an unidentified man described in the programme as a member of the IRA and an informer for the British security services, is wrong and damaged his reputation among the “broad republican family”.
At the opening of the trial, Tom Hogan SC, the lawyer representing Adams, told the jury his client’s reputation was that of a “peacemaker”.
The BBC denies defamation. It claims the programme and an associated article on its website were published in good faith and during discussion on a subject of public and vital interest.
Adams spent several days in the witness box. He gave evidence on Tuesday and Wednesday and began being cross-examined on Friday afternoon of last week. The cross-examination resumed on Tuesday and finished after midday on Thursday.
Wearing a fáinne ring indicating his willingness to speak Irish and an Easter lily badge on his suit jacket, Adams was unsteady getting up and down the steps to the witness box, but was clear in his answers and often sought, mostly unsuccessfully, to ask Gallagher questions.
He was led through published material about the IRA’s campaign of violence, with Adams repeatedly saying he was not in court to speak on behalf of the IRA or to “speculate” about who might or might not have been a member.
At times he managed to get the jury, most of whom are considerably younger than him, to smile and even, on occasion, laugh. They seemed intent on listening to what he had to say.
When Gallagher put it to Adams on Thursday that he had not sued in response to publications over the years that asserted he had been in the IRA and on its “army council” because he had been in the IRA and the army council, the judge intervened. The jury then left the courtroom to facilitate discussion in their absence and the matter was not pursued thereafter.
Gallagher put it to Adams that so long as the IRA had continued its campaign of violence, there couldn’t be a solution to the conflict. The IRA could have stopped its campaign earlier than it did and saved many lives, he said.
“I wish it was so easy,” Adams responded.
When Gallagher said that republicans eventually arrived at the view that violence was futile, Adams said: “I don’t think the IRA ever said violence was futile.”
The IRA was not the only party engaged in violence, Adams said. When Gallagher again said that it would have been easier to find a solution if the IRA had stopped its campaign, Adams replied: “I know. If my granny was my grandad. Please, don’t insult my intelligence by making these suggestions.”
Gallagher introduced books, broadcast clips and news articles published over the decades that asserted Adams had been a long-time senior member of the IRA, the key commander in Belfast on Bloody Friday – the day in July 1972 when the IRA exploded 19 bombs in central Belfast killing nine people and maiming more than 100 – and twice “chief of staff” of the illegal paramilitary group.
Adams said he joined Sinn Féin as a young man and not the IRA. He said he regularly discussed with his solicitors the possibility of taking court proceedings over published assertions that he was in the IRA. Their advice was invariably that “I wouldn’t get a fair trial”, he said.
He told the court he supported the IRA’s right to take “armed actions” but believed “noncombatants” should not be targeted.
Asked on Thursday by Mr Justice Alexander Owens about the IRA targeting of then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, Adams said that, notwithstanding his view that politicians should not be targeted, he thought the attack “was a legitimate response by the IRA to what Margaret Thatcher was doing in our country”.
The Spotlight programme quotes the unidentified man as saying Adams would have sanctioned the killing and that IRA murders had to be sanctioned by the political and the military “leadership”.
The import of this, according to Adams, is that in 2006, after the IRA had announced the previous year that its members should “go home” and that it was going to decommission its weapons, he sanctioned the IRA’s murder of Donaldson.
He and others had persuaded the IRA, he said, that there was a “way forward” that excluded violence and now they were being told, by Spotlight, that “oops-a-daisy, the IRA had not gone away” and that what republicans had been told “was a scam”. He considered it a “grievous smear” and one that was damaging to the “peace process”.
The judge has told the jury the publications introduced by Gallagher are only relevant as evidence in relation to Adams’s public reputation, not in relation to the truth or otherwise of the assertions they contain.
Adams’s reputation, he explained, was only relevant to any decision they may have to make about damages in the event they decide he has been defamed.
It was not their role, he explained, to decide whether Adams’s reputation was justified but rather the nature of his public reputation.
During his evidence, Adams, who said he reads a lot, remarked that he has written about 20 books. The evidence on Wednesday featured one book, Cage 11, a collection of pieces he wrote while interned in Long Kesh in the early 1970s.
Gallagher questioned Adams about a story in the book that concerns the author coming across an injured hedgehog while out late at night in Belfast, when British soldiers were patrolling the streets, and bringing the hedgehog back to the house of people well known to him.
“It’s actually, if I may say so myself, a very fine story,” Adams remarked.
Gallagher pointed out that an earlier iteration of the story, published in Republican News under the pen name Brownie, contained a line that did not appear in the book. The publisher must have taken it out, Adams said.
The line omitted from the book was a quip from a woman in the house, who imagined the man with the hedgehog being caught by the British army and the headline that would appear over a report of his arrest: “IRA man caught with hedgehog.”
Those present, according to the story, laughed at the quip. When Gallagher asked if the reference was removed because “that is what you were” [an IRA man]”.
Adams responded that he had already answered that question “ad nauseam”.
The point of the story, he said, was that at the end it disclosed that two sisters in the house the night the injured hedgehog was brought into “were shot dead a few weeks later by the British army in a car”.
The trial continues.
