Transcript of Justin’s Interview with Gerry Adams
December 5, 2024
Justin Chapman 00:14
Hi everyone. Welcome to "Well Read," I'm your host, Justin Chapman. We have a very, very special guest on the show today, Gerry Adams. Gerry, thank you so much for for joining me.
Gerry Adams 00:26
You're very welcome. Glad to see you and happy to do this, Justin.
Justin Chapman 00:31
Gerry is a lifelong Irish Republican who served as president of Sinn Fein from 1983 to 2018, as a member of the British Parliament for West Belfast from 1983 to 1992 and 1997 to 2011 and a member of the Irish Dail, or parliament, from 2011 to 2020. He's the author of many books, including Falls Memories, Before the Dawn, and Hope and History, among many others. He survived an assassination attempt and was a lead negotiator for the Good Friday Agreement, which ushered in the modern era of peace in the north of Ireland for the past quarter century plus following 30 years, of course, of the Troubles. Gerry, just so you know a little bit about me. I'm a dual U.S.-Irish citizen, so is my six year old daughter. We visited Ireland, South and North, this past August. My grandparents, Thomas Green and Norah Galvin, were born and lived in Dublin, had some family in Belfast, and they immigrated to Canada and then the U.S. in the 50s. And I consider myself a student of Irish history. I love learning about it. And of course, that history is still being written. So on that note, can you briefly tell us what happened in the recent Irish election, and what's your take on what that means going forward?
Gerry Adams 01:43
Well, the election is just over, as you well know. Sinn Fein came in as the second highest party. Fianna Fail came in as the largest party. And Fine Gael came in just behind us. So obviously, in every election, you'd like to get more votes than you actually do get. But if you look at it in the broad brush of history, since partition, both those parties and particularly Fianna Fail have dominated electoral and political affairs in the southern state. So what we have seen is the breaking--it's very slow--the breaking of the mold of electoral politics. The fact that we now have three main parties all within just a few percent of votes between them is a complete change than what has been there until now. The selection of the parties who will form the government, obviously, is made easier for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, because between them, they command 40% of the vote. So Sinn Fein comes in at 20% of the vote. So in order to lead a government, and there hasn't been a coalition government in the south since 198-, there hasn't been a majority government in the south since 1981. So the disadvantage is that outside of those two parties, which start off with that 40% advantage, it's very fragmented. So Fianna Fail refuse to deal with Sinn Fein, and for Sinn Fein to be part of the government, and the reason for that is fairly obvious. They are very, very concerned with holding on to power. And Micheál Martin has said a number of times, Sinn Fein will never do to Fianna Fail what Sinn Fein did to the SDLP. The SDLP used to be the majority nationalist party in the north, and they're now very, very small in size compared to Sinn Fein, which is the largest party. And we of course have the position with Michelle O'Neill of being the first minister. So I don't want to be boring your viewers or listeners with too much of this detail. But I repeat what I said previously, we are seeing the very slow break up, the very slow thawing of the monopoly which the two conservative parties used to have on politics in the southern state. And in the same way--and it took decades to do it, as we saw the overtaking of the unionist parties by Sinn Fein in the north.
Justin Chapman 05:13
I recently saw the “Kneecap” movie, and I just absolutely loved it. It's the best film I've seen all year, for sure. And your cameo, of course, is very funny, when you appear in a character's drug trip. How did that come about? And what do you think about how Kneecap the band is revitalizing interest in Irish language and culture and political awareness in younger generations in Ireland and abroad?
Gerry Adams 05:39
Well, I appeared in the [Kneecap] movie because they asked me. They are three local Gaeilgeoirí, three local young people who were reared in the Irish language, and I'm part of that community as well. So I was very pleased to take part. It was a bit of fun. It was a bit of craic. And the impact of the film--bear in mind before the film came Kneecap were having an impact anyway within their own peer group and with young people. But the impact of the film has been to thrust the whole issue of the Irish language straight into the mainstream in a way that it hasn't been for some time. And I think that's good. I think some people might, you know, older people, other folks might think the film has too much bad language in it, and you wouldn't bring your granny to see it and I've heard all those comments. But it's a bit of fun, and it represents--and it's very clever. What I like about it, apart from the funny bits, what I like about it is that it's smart. It's clever. It finds smart ways to tell the story, and that's all to the good and long may they continue.
Justin Chapman 07:13
Absolutely. I mean, it's so funny to see them playing packed crowds in London, and the crowds are singing, “Get your Brits out.”
Gerry Adams 07:20
Yeah.
Justin Chapman 07:22
Let me ask you a macro question. Do you think island of Ireland will ever be united, and when's the right time to hold that referendum?
Gerry Adams 07:32
Well, I think the right time to hold the referendum is when we're going to win it. So I think the lesson of Brexit is don't jump into something without having had the proper lead in, without having had the proper discussion, education, information, without bringing everybody to the point where they can make rational and informed decisions. Now the the Irish government have a huge responsibility--and this brings me back to Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, particularly Fianna Fail--they refuse to plan for the future. All of us plan for the future, no matter how awkward we are--we wouldn't be meeting now if we hadn't arranged it, if we hadn't planned to do it, and it's a sensible thing for a government to do. The argument that we have been putting forward is that there should be a series of citizens assemblies. Now, the device of citizens assemblies is used--it's a very democratic device--it's used in the south, particularly, to bring people together, to bring experts to inform, to educate, and through that process to bring in the wider population. And some of the big decisions recently, like on women's reproductive rights and on other matters like that, on marriage equality, happened after citizens assemblies. So it definitely works as a device to break down difficult issues or to get people information which people deserve. So we would argue very strongly that an Irish government should plan for the future, in the first instance by holding that type of information, discussion, democratic get-together to thrash out any issue that people think is important. We also--if you were doing this interview with a taoiseach, I think the first question every taoiseach should be asked--and I used to do this when I was dealing with the taoiseach--ask him: have they asked the British government to leave? The Good Friday Agreement is the agreement by which a democratic way of resolving the issue of British rule in Ireland was put together, so it's peaceful, it's democratic, it gives the people their say. The British government and the Irish government should be in partnership to bring that about. So a taoiseach--and Mary Lou MacDonald when she was contesting the election pledged to do this, that if she was elected as Taoiseach--and there's still space for her to be acted as taoiseach in some future election--the first thing she would do would be to talk to the British government about getting a process like the one that I have just outlined. So to summarize that: plan for the future, set the date for the referendum when that process of engagement has taken place and when all the issues of concern, issues that people are afraid of, all have been dealt with, and then we go forward on the basis of a democratic decision by the people of the island.
Justin Chapman 11:27
So you grew up in a family with a long history of republican politics, and then fairly early on, you got involved in that activism yourself, especially around the civil rights movement in the 60s. Do you think that the Troubles could have been avoided, or largely avoided, had the British, accepted the--from my point of view--rather reasonable demands of the civil rights movement around housing, employment, education, voting rights, rather than using its state violence, internment, these other brutal measures to repress protests? At what point did it go past the point of no return?
Gerry Adams 12:06
I do think--and it's impossible to--hindsight is a good man to have at any meeting--impossible to reflect and look back on and point out what might have happened, but I think it's fair to say 1) that the demands of the civil rights movement were very modest, that had those demands been conceded and that people have been given the modicum of civil rights, then the conflict may have been avoided. Now, remember where the first violence came from. The first violence came from the Northern state, which had run an apartheid system since partition, and which involved, among other things, denying people the right to a job, the right to be free of discrimination, the right to be free of sectarian harassment, the right to vote in certain elections, and and so on. So had those been given, one could imagine that we would have had a different 40 years than the 40 years that we had. So the first reaction then to the demands was for the right wing of unionism to oppose them, and instead of a British government saying, 'Whoops-a-daisy, this is part of the United Kingdom,' because the beauty of the civil rights demands were, 'Okay, if you say we're British, then give us the same rights as people have in Britain.' The British government should have said, 'These people deserve these rights, and we're bringing them in,' and they should have stood down or they should have faced down those who were opposing through violent means. So it was a good while after we had the street disturbances, after sectarian killings started, after the B-Specials were unleashed on people, after the RUC were unleashed on people, after the pogroms, it was a good while before there was violence from the Republican side. So the short answer to your question is, whatever the consequence may have been, and I would imagine that they would have been different from what we have all come through, but whatever the consequences, these were very, very basic rights that people deserved, and they should have been accorded them in any case.
Justin Chapman 14:57
The Irish civil rights movement was of course modeled on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, but the U.S. movement was largely dedicated to non-violent resistance, even in the face of very violent state repression, especially in southern states. Why do you think the situation in Ireland escalated so quickly? Was violence born out of necessity in that situation?
Gerry Adams 15:22
First of all, it wasn't entirely nonviolent from the States. There were those like the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and so on who had a different position than Martin Luther King. But having said that, the difference is a matter of--it's historical. The history of our island, going back to the conquest, going back to the first time we were colonized, is that the Irish resisted, that they either absorbed those who came, and as famously said, they became more Irish than the Irish themselves, or they resisted, and therefore dreadful means of subjugating us were used, methods which were later to be used in other colonies. We saw the starvation of people. We saw the eviction of people. We saw cultural colonialism. You go back to Kneecap [who say] the most invidious colonization is that of the mind. So they did away with the language. They banned poetry. They banned songs. They mistreated people. The expression they used was that they were in Ireland to 'civilize the barbarians.' So the Irish were animals. The same language is used by Zionists about the Palestinian people. The same language was used to justify the USA going into Vietnam. Government rarely say, 'We're going in there because we have strategic interests,' or 'We're going in there because we like your gold or your oil,' or 'We're trying to exert geopolitical dominance.' No, they always disguise it as, 'We're going in there because they're communists, because they're a threat to us, because they're barbarians.' When you when you consider the history of resistance through those centuries, when after the inhumanity of partition and the apartheid system was here, because there were dormant physical force players on the Irish republican side. They barely existed in the 1960s but in the face of the pogroms, they came forward once again. And that's part of the history of the island, that one of the most durable tendencies in Irish history, from the broad Republican point of view, is the physical force tradition. So once it was seen that passive resistance or peaceful demonstrations weren't working, then the natural instinct was to stand up and fight back.
Justin Chapman 18:52
One thing I've noticed in the media and pop culture, they tend to focus exclusively on the IRA, ignoring loyalist paramilitaries. Even the latest TV show “Say Nothing” completely glosses over loyalist violence. Everybody knows about the IRA, but I'd bet most people outside of Ireland and the UK couldn't name a loyalist group. Why is that? Why do you think that has been the trend over so many years?
Gerry Adams 19:22
Well, I don't know. The media, broadly speaking, represents establishment interests. So the British media will act as it does now, and there are very honorable exceptions to this, and there have been very brave news outlets and journalists who have been very objective and very balanced as they come forward. The broad propaganda--we're a small island; if you reduce it back to the North, we're even smaller again. The Irish government, for historical reasons, defended its own position. So it was a small group or a minority of the population, though they may have had passive support from a huge amount of people on the island of Ireland and from the diaspora, but there were small groups. So the more dominant groups being the British, the establishment, the British allies, its own forces, those who it commissioned, the collusion that it used, the counter gangs that it set up--that narrative was writ large. But the question that you posed has been explored by many historians who are aghast as they go into the detail of it, how the conflict in Ireland was depicted as being religious, or has been in some way totally sectarian and so on. Having said all of that, there's another side of the coin, that most people who lived in colonies, or who still live in colonies, understand that the British government has no right in Ireland, and understand and admire the Irish tenacity and the Irish determination. And here, even, depending on when you want to start, 800 or 900 years later, we're still struggling to get our freedom, and we haven't given up. I'm convinced that we're going to get the referendum that we talked about a few moments ago, and I'm convinced that a majority of people will support that, and we will live in a united Ireland.
Justin Chapman 21:56
It seemed like it was really pulling teeth getting the British government to the negotiating table for the Good Friday Agreement. It took years of of talks and ceasefires and everything. In the meantime, they're stalling with demands of decommissioning, etc. What was it that broke that impasse and allowed the Good Friday Agreement to move forward?
Gerry Adams 22:16
Sheer tenacity. And also a willingness, as we developed methods of struggle, to move from the politics of resistance into politics of change, understanding that we didn't have the strength to bring this about ourselves, but there were other people out there. If we could get them to be involved, if we could reshape our struggle to allow for that, then we would be stronger. So we established strategic objectives, and that included trying to form alliances or coalitions with others on the national question, that is, on the right of the people of Ireland to the self-determination. We didn't necessarily need everybody to want an Irish Republic, although that would be good if they did. But what we did was to try and get people to support the right of the people of the island to determine our own form of governance, whatever that might be, free of English rule if that's what the people desired. We decided to internationalize what we were doing, which is quite difficult, particularly as we live in an island, but we have a huge diaspora--you're evidence of that, and your interest and your knowledge is evidence of that. So we found it relatively easy once we moved into that new type of dispensation, to get our friends in the USA. The common factor with all of the different presidents who came to help with the process, starting with President Clinton, was Irish America. They were the people that put the issues on the presidential agenda and stayed with it and still stay with it to this day. And there were other elements of what we did. Two people played significant roles in all of this, they were both Catholic priests. One was Father Des Wilson and one was Father Alec Reid. They lived in West Belfast, so they knew that a lot of what was being said was propaganda, and they knew that Republicans were decent people, and they knew that there was a lot of hurt being inflicted upon the people that they were working with. I remember my dialogue, particularly with Father Alec, saying, if people want the IRA to stop, then they need to come up with an alternative. So they then argued for that with the great and the good. And as part of that process, we then realized that the establishment wasn't going to come up with an alternative. Why would they? We would have to come up with the alternative, and therefore, by that process of just being tenacious and persistent and long headed, and also we learned a lot from South Africa. We were greatly emboldened when Madiba, Nelson Mandela, was released from prison, and we went and met with him and with the leadership of the African National Congress. We realized that in their place and in our place, we were both doing more or less the same thing. This was a great encouragement to us, because they had moved from apartheid into a free South Africa, and Mandela had moved from a prison cell to become president of his country. That was good for us to see, if we were able to continue with this process that we had established. We were the first political party to agree and to decide to adopt peace as a political objective. We asked the question, 'What is peace? How do you get peace?' And so on and so forth. And we won that argument. And eventually, eventually, after many stops and starts, we got the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement, and we had the Irish government in place. We had a British government which was more positive and progressive than previous ones. We had John Hume playing a central role. John was head of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Before we actually went into the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, Sinn Fein had been involved in a series of negotiations with both governments, with the U.S. Many of these negotiations were conducted through intermediaries, through back channels, but we had a lot of the work done by the time we came to the negotiations, which led to the historic Good Friday Agreement.
Justin Chapman 27:42
When you were a teenager, I understand you worked at a pub in a Protestant area. What's the situation now? Would you be safe walking down the Shankill Road, for example? Are there areas of Belfast you still can't go?
Gerry Adams 28:00
I do take care of my security. I think it's important. You can't be over-vigilant. At the same time you get on with your life. I don't broadcast what I'm doing all the time. But I can move about and do my own thing and enjoy what other people might enjoy. Obviously more important than what I might do is that there are young people--the Good Friday Agreement is 25 years old, so if you're 35, unless you were directly affected, or your family were directly affected by the conflict, you may have little memory of what went on before. And certainly, if you were born since the Good Friday Agreement, you will have grown up in peace. It's not perfect, but it's as good as there is anywhere else, and there's an ongoing process of change, and I think the peace process is totally sustainable. There may be--you couldn't rule out that there may be some dastardly deed, but there are more gang-related killings in Dublin or London or New York--there haven't been any setbacks for the peace process over decades now, and I would be confident that that's going to continue.
Justin Chapman 29:45
What do you see as your legacy in the struggle for Ireland? Ireland has such a long, rich history with many colorful, passionate characters--what do you want history to remember about your contributions to the struggle for Irish freedom and unity?
Gerry Adams 29:59
Well, I don't mind. It isn't an issue that I dwell on too much. I won't be here, so I don't mind. I do my best. I still do my best. I did my best back in the day. I was one out of many. I've never seen myself as anything other than a team player in my peer group of activists. Some of them are what we would call 40 or 50 year activists. We were just very, very lucky to have that continuity of cohesive leadership for decades. So I don't really mind. I'm sure the people that dislike me or hate me will continue to do so. I'm sure the people who like me or love me will continue to do so. But I don't really mind.
Justin Chapman 30:58
And finally, what are your plans for the future? Are you working on any new books or other projects? And is there any chance you'll run for president of Ireland next year?
Gerry Adams 31:08
No, I'm not running for presidential or any other elected office. This question keeps being asked of me, no matter how many times I knock it back. So no, I have no--I represented people as a public official from, I think it was 1982 or 1983, with one, two or three year layoff when I lost an election, and I uniquely represented people in the Northern Assembly, in the British Parliament, and in the Irish parliament. There's lots of other more able people from Sinn Fein doing a fine job in all of those electoral positions. I'm working on a number of books at the moment. I'm working on a book, the working title is Unlawfully Detained. It sprang from the British Supreme Court finding that I had been unlawfully detained, that the four and a half years or so that I spent over different phases in custody in cases of Long Kesh, on the prison ship the Maidstone, and in another prisons, that that had been unlawful. So that got me to think about, because people were a bit shocked, and I wasn't the only one. I took the case because there were about between 200-400 other people in the same position, and I took the case almost as a test case. But people were a bit shocked that this was the reality. And the book is to tell people, Look, it was always like this, that the British use the law for their own ends, and they wrap up what they're doing in a legal parcel. And so I'm working on that as we speak. And I have one or two other smaller projects. I have a book called Cage 11, which I'm actually launching on Saturday coming, which was first published maybe 30 years ago. It's a series of articles that were written in Cage 11, in the cages of Long Kesh by myself and other prisoners. The ones that I wrote were subsequently put together in a book. So these are articles which are uniquely written in the prison. That was illegal to do so. The new edition actually has drawings which were done at the time in Cage 11 by a friend of mine, Donnie de Benny, who went on to become one of our foremost mural painters. So that book, I'm glad to say, like 50 years on, has now been republished by Brandon books. I'm writing a lot of the time. Obviously, I'd be busy with other projects, with political projects and community projects, but I like writing. I find it therapeutic, and I'm hopeful of having Unlawfully Detained dawned, God willing, early in 2025.
Justin Chapman 34:49
Gerry, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you talking with me about your life and about Ireland. And thank you for everything you've done for Ireland. I certainly hope we see a United Ireland in your lifetime, certainly in my lifetime. And I just really appreciate you coming on and speaking with me.
Gerry Adams 35:08
Thank you, Justin, and thanks for your patience. It's always good to meet someone like yourself who doesn't forget where you came from. So thank you, my friend, and take care. My regards to your daughter and to your family.
Justin Chapman 35:22
Thank you. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours as well.