One of the mysteries of Sinn Féin's finances is the gap between the vast sums it raises in the US and the amounts it spends on elections in Ireland, writes Fintan O'Toole.
But there is a perfectly logical explanation: the cost of keeping Gerry Adams in trousers. Every time he denies that he was ever a member of the IRA, his pants catch fire. As the questions, and the denials, become more frequent, this act of spontaneous combustion takes place on an ever more regular basis.
In the old days, when he dressed from Dunnes Stores, this wasn't so bad, but ever since Tiochfaidh ár Lá became Tiochfaidh Armani, we are talking about serious money.
The real question, however, is whether Gerry Adams's inability to acknowledge his past matters at all. The point of a lie is to deceive, and in this case the deception is scarcely perceptible. The evidence of his having been a senior IRA member is so overwhelming that it is impossible to find anyone who actually believes his denials. As early as July 1972, when Adams was just 23, the British government arranged talks with the IRA leadership in London. One of the IRA's conditions for agreeing to take part was that Adams be released from custody to join its negotiating team.
In January 1973, the US embassy in Dublin reported to Washington that the IRA was led by a "Troika" , namely Dáithí O'Connell, Joe Cahill and Gerry Adams, "who is still an active Belfast military commander".
In 2002, Dolours Price, who was convicted of involvement in the planting of four IRA car-bombs in London in March 1973, described Adams as "my commanding officer" at the time.
In the mid-1970s, Adams, then a prisoner in Long Kesh, wrote for An Phoblacht under the pseudonym "Brownie". In a column in May 1976, he made his only public admission of IRA membership. "Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer and, rightly or wrongly, I take a course of action as a means to bringing about a situation in which I believe the people of my country will prosper," Adams wrote. "The course I take involves the use of physical force." So in one light, Adams's denials can be seen merely as the kind of meaningless gesture that politicians sometimes find necessary. They are the equivalent of an old-style Irish politician beginning a speech with a "cúpla focal" of Gaelic, or Tony Blair singing The Red Flag at a Labour Party conference.
Since only a fool would believe that the cúpla focal merchant is committed to the Irish language or that Tony Blair is a socialist, the lie is not so much a deception as a ritual fabrication. It is almost a form of good manners, like telling your granny that you just love the hideous jumper she knitted for you.
In Adams's case, democratic politicians needed someone from the IRA to deal with and it suited everyone to pretend at the same time that that person wasn't really from the IRA. Adams himself in that sense was a necessary fiction. The problem is, though, that the fiction has become a real lie. For quite separate reasons, North and South, it has grown into a boil that needs to be lanced.
In the Republic, Adams has become, according to the polls, the most respected party leader. Here is a society which is obsessed with the sins of the past. We have tribunals inquiring into the financial misdeeds of politicians and businessmen 15 years ago. We have a church wracked with the guilt of institutionalised abuse stretching back half a century.
And yet we seem to deeply admire a politician who has been accused by a highly respected journalist, Ed Moloney, in his book A Secret History of the IRA, of having established and controlled the cell within the IRA that kidnapped, tortured and "disappeared" Jean McConville and others. It is surely quite reasonable for, say, Liam Lawlor to wonder why he has gone to jail for his evasiveness in relation to land deals and planning in the 1980s while Gerry Adams, who has not dealt in any open way with these infinitely more serious allegations, is a political saint.
And at the same time, Sinn Féin has not adopted a policy consistent with Gerry Adams's personal position of drawing a veil over all the hideous deeds of the Troubles.
It has supported or demanded inquiries into Bloody Sunday, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the murder of Pat Finucane, and collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.
And this double-standard isn't just regrettable hypocrisy. It cripples the peace process by making reconciliation impossible. It creates two categories of victims - those murdered by the state and/or loyalists, whose families deserve a full accounting, and those murdered by the IRA who do not.
The best way to cope with these real problems is not to focus solely on Gerry Adams but to do what should have been done as part of the Belfast Agreement: establish a proper Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Only thus can we recognise that reconciliation without truth is just as false a concept as truth without reconciliation.