“when I learnt that he was a member of Sinn Féin..”
Questions remain about Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’ actions during the 22 years since he was told of the allegations of child abuse by his brother Liam – allegations he told UTV Insight Special that he believed on hearing them from his niece Aine in 1987. The Sunday Tribune report on Liam Adams’ attempt to secure the Sinn Féin Dáil nomination for Co Louth in 1997 has a photograph of Gerry Adams at Liam Adams’ second marriage, taken sometime after the allegations were made, and notes that Liam Adams was described as a “‘project worker’ on a youth scheme” in a Dundalk newspaper in 2004. In the comments zone of Mick’s post on that Dáil nomination, Mark points to a short notice in An Phoblacht in 1997 of a pamphlet written by Liam Adams on “Our children, drugs, alcohol and solvents” produced by “Dundalk-based Muirhevnamor Community Youth Project”. The Tribune report also indicated this New York Times article from 1998 where Liam Adams, who “came to Dundalk 10 years ago”, is referred to as “the chairman of the community council”. On RTÉ’s This Week Tommie Gorman asked Gerry Adams [10min 27sec in]- “But I’m talking about you as a public person, as the leader of a party. Your brother continued to be a member of Sinn Féin. You knew about these accusations about him, you actually believed these accusations..”
[Gerry Adams] “Well I moved when I heard that my brother, my brother moved out of my life and moved out of all of our lives when he went abroad for a while. And then he come back and although I saw him occasionally during that period, maybe a period of 15 years, when I learnt that he was a member of Sinn Féin it was I who moved to get him dumped out of Sinn Féin. When I heard that he was working in youth facilities again I pressed him to leave and with one of the facilities I reported it to the authorities which were responsible for that facility. All I can tell you is that we now know much more about child abuse and how to deal with it than we did as I was developing my knowledge about it all.”
The Sunday Tribune report, and I believe the UTV Insight Special, note that the facility Gerry Adams intervened in was in his constituency of West Belfast
At one stage Liam Adams worked for youth groups in West Belfast. Gerry Adams claims he had no knowledge of this and stopped it when he found out. Gerry Adams also said that he took his niece, then aged 14, to confront her father when he heard of the allegations.
His behaviour has been criticised by those who deal with sexual abuse. Eileen Calder of the North’s Rape Crisis Centre, said: “Gerry Adams has an awful lot of explaining to do about the way he handled the situation. He is so well-educated and politically astute, how did he mishandle it so badly?
This is a problem with criminal law in general. Child porn downloading is provable. There is an evidence trail on the hard drive. While I don’t know the specifics of the case you are discussing, not all child porn is “sickening abuse” really either. At the extreme “tame” end the definition includes pictures that were legally published in national tabloids such as the Sun and the Star 15 years ago (i.e. topless 16 and 17 year olds) or the modern day equivalent produced by “sexting” on mobile phones. Child porn panic has also veered into the bizarre with the like of the Simpsons cartoon case in Australia. Also the well known Wikipedia Scorpions album cover case, which probably led to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people breaking the child pornography laws out of sheer curiosity, who are probably no more likely to commit contact offences than would be a random trawl of the electoral register.
However possession of the images is relatively easy to demonstrate, so the police can chalk up an easy conviction. I’d like to think that the police would give a slap on the wrist to someone merely with a Wikipedia page in their browser cache but in the current frenzy frankly I’d be worried.
On the other hand Liam Adam’s case is not so easy to prove, and even now there is the possibility that he is innocent. If we abandon this legal principal entirely, then there is the possibility that any one of us here could post a political opinion that rubs someone up the wrong way such that they track down our identity and accuse us of a child sex offense to our neighbours or coworkers. Do you think that anyone has the right to do that to YOU and that you should be put on the sex offender’s register for a mere allegation? What if you’re a teacher?
It has to be really though doesn’t it? Some crimes are more difficult to prove than others. Easy to prove possession of cannabis, hard to prove a rape, which is a crime that could hinge on the mental states of the two people involved and might even be ambiguous if we had CCTV footage of the entire event.