Gerry Adams: “I am perfectly at peace.”

Mick has his thoughts below but I thought I would add my own on Adams’s documentary about Jesus. To be honest it told us little we did not already know. Adams looked at the life of Jesus and was told about possible differences between the suggested real life of Jesus and the gospel accounts. Adams seemed more interested in Jesus’s teachings than in the historical or theological niceties.

When he came to the discussion of the relevance of Jesus’s teaching to his own life he was asked a few questions about how Jesus’s non violent message conflicted with the IRA campaign of violence. Unsurprisingly in view of the nature of the programme Adams’s rewriting of the history of the Troubles was never challenged. he was not challenged when he stated: “If no one pushing for a peaceful solution then you will get violence;” clearly the SDLP never happened.

Please put comments on Mick’s thread below on the same subjectAdams also clung to what has become a standard mantra of the revisionists over the troubles: “All of us have plenty to forgive and be forgiven for.” He did not, however, have the nerve to explain to Alan McBride that by that logic Adams must feel that somehow Sharon McBride and indeed Alan himself must have been responsible for something.

On the Shankill bombing he stated: “…Shankill bomb went off prematurely; A stupid operation did not take into account the safety of the civilians and operation which was fundamentally flawed and wrong.” Of course it was left unsaid that the IRA had never considered the safety of civilians at Darkley, Kingsmills, La Mon, Bloody Friday, Claudy, Enniskillen. Actually that is untrue: the IRA had carefully considered their safety and indeed calculated specifically how to kill them; in that sense they had indeed carefully ensured making them dead.

Particularly interesting, however, was that Adams never described the people who were killed in the Shankill bombing as murdered, nor any other victims of the IRA. However, he used the word murdered at least twice when referring to the death of Pat Finnucane. Clearly to Adams there is a hierarchy of victim hood with the IRA’s victims being much less important.

The nauseating hypocrisy and moral blindness which has always afflicted the self styled intellectual, thinker and statesman was of course there is spades. At one point Adams explained that he felt closer to God here: the here in question being the wilds of bogland. Is that because he helped ensure many people met their maker prematurely in similar places?

One final interesting comment was “elites never present their case as anything but for the common good.” Adams of course is now part of the elite; he has climbed there over the bodies of literally thousands of people, his opponents, his supporters and all sorts of others. Adams, however, explains that he is “perfectly at peace.” Sad that rest in peace has been written so many times about the true innocents to get him there.