So what did I learn about Gerry Adams from recently spending the best part of two weeks looking at him in the Royal Courts of Justice?
Published: 26 March 2026
Not a great deal more than I knew after studying him for more than three decades, except that he is very much yesterday’s man.
Adams was in court being sued for ‘vindicatory’ damages of £1 by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, whose lives had been blighted by injuries received from bombs respectively in 1973 in the Old Bailey and in 1996 in Docklands and Manchester for which they believed he bore responsibility as a member of the IRA Army Council.
In the end, both sides agreed the case would be “discontinued” and both sides would pay their own costs.
The claimants were seemingly terrified of losing their modest assets.
I imagine Adams knew that to drive them to bankruptcy would not be a good look.
He arrived on the first day with security men, several of whom — it was confirmed in court — were former IRA, proudly exhibiting his stab-proof vest.
Neither it nor they were necessary.
Apart from a handful, neither the people who used to worship him nor those who hated him could be bothered to turn up.
He exhibited familiar signs of delusion, arrogance and unreliability as a witness to history, but his voice was low and mostly he stayed polite.
I noted with amusement that saying hello to each other politely on the first day was a far cry from when I’d seen him last, denouncing me loudly in 1999 to a large west Belfast audience for having been part of a Dublin media clique that for thirty years had silenced these “misfortunate people”.
London-based, at the time I had been a journalist for only five years, but then, as I knew, Adams has never been a man for detail.
This time he began with the old familiar story of how as a youth he was inspired by the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland “that was campaigning for the Catholic right to vote.”
Er, there was no religious discrimination in voting in Northern Ireland. Ever.
Senior members of Sinn Fein still trumpet that untruth in the US, along with the claim that they had lived in an apartheid state.
Adams denied everything and told the judge that he would go to his grave content at his outreach to unionists and his role in bringing about a united Ireland.
You can find unionists who think Martin McGuinness had some redeeming features, but I’ve never met any who felt that way about Adams.
I think it’s his sanctimony that primarily repels them.
And his denials of ever having been in the IRA and his industrious revising of history.
I keep thinking of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wonderful poem ‘Ozymandias’ about the traveller who came across vast legs of stone in the desert.
‘Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read…’
I noticed in court that his upper lip trembled a little, constantly.
