
Senator Michael McDowell tells court he's only met two politicians who didn't believe Gerry Adams was in IRA
MICHAEL McDowell told a jury in Gerry Adams' case that he has never met any politician - apart from Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris - who did not believe the former Sinn Fein president was a member of the Provisional IRA.
Senator McDowell, a former Tanaiste and attorney general, was giving evidence at the
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Gerry Adams claims the BBC defamed him
Credit: 2025 PA Media, All Rights Reserved
The
On Wednesday, asked by BBC counsel Paul Gallagher SC about Mr Adams' reputation among the public, Mr McDowell said that Mr Adams' is known as a politician now, who was a leading member of the IRA, and who was active in the
He said he was reputed to have been a chief negotiator between the provisional movement and the British government in the 1970s, and thereafter, he was reputed to have a role in the
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Following this he was reputed to have become a member of the IRA's army council, Mr McDowell said.
Asked, in his view, how widespread these views are, Mr McDowell said that excluding former
He said during the peace process that immediately following the Belfast Agreement in 1998, the view of those in the
Asked more generally about Mr Adams' reputation among politicians, Mr McDowell said that he has never met any politician that did not believe he was a leading member of the IRA during its armed campaign, and thereafter a dominant figure within its
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Earlier, Ann Travers, whose sister was killed by the IRA in 1984, said Mr Adams' reputation was that of a 'warmonger'.
She said she believed this because of his support of the IRA and 'the murder of innocent people'.
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Michael McDowell told a jury in Gerry Adams' case that he has never met any politician - apart from Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris - who did not believe he was an IRA member
Credit: � 2025 PA Media, All Rights Reserved

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Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Death In Derry - Martin McGuinness and the Derry IRA's War Against The British: Strong on candour, weak on analysis
Death In Derry: Martin McGuinness and the Derry IRA's War Against The British Author : Jonathan Trigg ISBN-13 : 978-1785375477 Publisher : Merrion Press Guideline Price : €19.99 This book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the Troubles period and the history of the IRA. Jonathan Trigg has secured interviews with several former British soldiers and IRA members, many under pseudonyms. This is new material. The weaknesses in the book are that it is not strong on political analysis and that it accepts simplistic versions of key events such as the Battle of the Bogside and the Falls Road rioting of August 1969. He says, for instance, that the 1971 internment raids were not extended to loyalists because of unionist pressure. Actually, this was on legal advice that such a measure could not be used against a force that did not threaten the state – the same logic by which the Irish government refused to intern IRA members at the same time. READ MORE Trigg is happy to describe the period of violence as a war, accepting terminology favoured by the IRA themselves. He writes of IRA activists in a tone bordering on admiration, apparently as one soldier respecting others. [ A former British army officer and author on former IRA members opening up to him: 'Trust is a huge issue' Opens in new window ] That will grate with some who will prefer a more moralistic approach and will not like to read of murders being described as 'successes'. Trigg is a military historian. His strengths are in understanding military culture and warfare. It is almost endearing how he admits to occasional failings in his research. One IRA man refuses to tell him what he was jailed for and he leaves it at that, when another researcher might have gone into the newspaper archives and found out. He misses some important nuances. In a chapter about the south Derry IRA centred around Bellaghy, he attributes the reduced level of republican militancy in the area to the presence of the literary centre Seamus Heaney HomePlace, and the 'thousands of tourists wandering around with their camera phones'. Clearly he hasn't been to Bellaghy lately. However, he has secured the candour of several former Provos and soldiers, and this factor provides an understanding of their actions and their thinking that earns the book a place on the shelves of any serious future researchers or writers on the period. One amusing detail is that the British army developed a remote control camera system for monitoring suspects but had to scrap it because those suspects would hear the click and the whirr of the film winder. That wouldn't be a problem with the technology of today.


Irish Examiner
8 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Séamas O'Reilly: Many of the tropes of standard Irishness are not universally applied both sides of the border
You might be expecting me, a topical columnist, to give you, the schoolchildren of Ireland, a timely pep talk about the Leaving Cert exams you've just started, perhaps with a stirring tale from my own experience. Sadly, I can't do that because I never did the Leaving Cert. I was raised in Derry, and thus the British school system, so I did A-levels. They are, I'm sure, similar enough to the Leaving Cert that much of my advice would still be relevant, but still different enough that it wouldn't really make much sense to apply them directly to the exams you're sitting now. Such are the slightly odd contradictions of being raised in Northern Ireland and discovering, over many years, that many of the full-fat tropes of standard Irishness are not universally applied both sides of the border. I should be clear up-front that I've never felt any neurosis about this. It would, I suppose, take a lot for someone named Séamas O'Reilly to gain a complex about being insufficiently Irish. Sometimes, however, these complexes are thrust in front of me. Rarely, however, in London, where few locals know, or care, the difference between north and south. Here, it's mostly had a simplifying effect, where I might as well be from Tallaght, Togher, or Twomileborris, if they had any clue where those places were. No, here it's my status as an undercover Brit that surprises people, and has even granted me the opportunity to shock unsuspecting Londoners with my deep knowledge of BBC radio comedy, or British cultural products of our shared yesteryear. More deliciously still, it's also allowed me to correct them when they've called me an immigrant, usually with the attendant undertone that I should complain less about my gracious hosts. When, this week, the Telegraph printed a rabidly scaremongering report that 'White British people will be a minority in 40 years', they clarified this cohort as 'the white British share of the population — defined as people who do not have an immigrant parent'. Leaving aside how garbled that formulation is — there are millions of non-white Brits who meet that definition perfectly — it carried with it a parallel consequence. I myself do not have an immigrant parent. In fact, every single pale and freckled ancestor of mine since 1800, Irish farmers to a soul, was born and raised in something called the United Kingdom. This is true for a large number of Irish people in the North. And since the late Prince Philip was himself a Greek immigrant, it gives me great pleasure to point out that they'd settled on a definition of 'White British' which includes Gerry Adams but excludes King Charles III. The only people who've ever questioned my Irishness — to my face — are other Irish people, admittedly rarely, and almost always in the form of gentle ribbing from the sort of pub comedians who call their straight-haired friend 'Curly'. The type who're fond of hearing me say 'Derry' and asking, reflexively, whether I mean 'Londonderry'. In the time-honoured tradition of any Derry person who's encountered this comment — oh, five or six million times in their life — I simply laugh it off and say I've heard that one before. Similarly, if some irrepressible wit asks a Derry person whether we're in the IRA, we'll tell them that's quite an offensive stereotype, while also peppering the rest of our conversation with vague, disconcerting comments designed to imply that we might indeed be members of a paramilitary organisation and that they should, therefore, stop talking to us. For the most part, I regard my British birth certificate and UK-system schooling as a mundane quirk of my fascinating personal biography. I am, in fact, confident enough in my identity that tabulating concrete differences between the North and South has simply become something of a hobby. The Leaving Cert is one such mystery. I gather that it involves every student in Ireland taking tests in about 760 subjects, crammed into the same time I was given to learn four. And that you must take Irish throughout the entirety of your schooling, so that you can emerge from 13 straight years of daily instruction in the language, cursing the fact you never got a chance to learn it. I know, vaguely, that some part of this learning involves a book about — by? — a woman named Peig, and that the very mention of her name inspires tens of thousands of Irish people my age to speak in tones of awe, nostalgia, mockery and reverence, always in English. Of course, almost all facets of the Irish school system are exotic to me. I feel that no finer term has ever been coined for small children than 'senior infants' but I've no idea what age it could possibly apply to. I know that there is such a thing as a transition year, but not what that means, precisely, still less what it's for. I know that summer holidays are different, namely that they're longer than what we get up North. I primarily know this because I grew up on the border and suffered the cruel indignity of marching off to school each June, in full sight of my friends eight feet away in Donegal, who seemed to have summer holidays that lasted about eight months of the year. I was told, perhaps erroneously, that this period of glorious leisure stems from the days when kids were expected to be at home on the farm, and the school calendar augmented so as to enable the nation-sustaining pyramid of child labour this demanded. I saw no sign of this in the few kids I'd spy from the bus window as I was conveyed to class, idling on deck chairs and inflating beach balls in the driving rain. Know that you have this glorious reward in your near future, if you're worried about the exams you've just begun. I hope the few you've started have already gone well. Take solace. Be unafraid. By my count, there's just 740 more to go. Read More Colm O'Regan: Cleaning the house can both spark joy and cause a panic


Irish Post
13 hours ago
- Irish Post
Face to face with the Ulster warlord
I FIRST met Andy Tyrie, the leader of an armed loyalist group, who died last week, in 1986. A BBC religious affairs programme, Sunday Sequence on Radio Ulster, had started hiring me as a freelance reporter and interviewing Tyrie was one of my first jobs. He was of interest to a religious affairs programme because the producers thought he might have thoughts on how much loyalist violence against Catholics was religiously motivated. I had to travel to a part of Belfast I did not normally feel safe in, where the population was almost entirely Protestant and unionist. Esther who managed reception, pressed the buzzer to let me through the security gate and directed me up the stairs to Short Kesh. This was the joke name for Tyrie's office, a pun on Long Kesh, the site of the Maze prison which housed loyalist and republican convicts. I found Tyrie affable and witty. He was a stout and tawny man with dark hair and a thick moustache. I assumed that the loyalist sectarian marauders he governed had at least the good sense not to shoot a journalist, one who might air their case, if they had one. We spent a couple of hours talking and then I recorded the interview. We covered a lot of ground. His basic theory was that sectarian tension in Northern Ireland was about territory. Most working class Protestants lived in housing developments that were almost exclusively Protestant but the Catholic population was increasing and needed housing too. The Ulster Defence Association which he led was ostensibly about defending Northern Ireland, or Ulster as they called it, against the IRA. In reality it was more concerned to scare away Catholics who had moved into houses in what loyalists regarded as Protestant areas. We talked also about new ideas being developed at that time about loyalist culture. Tyrie said that loyalists had been surprised to see that republicans in the prisons were able to communicate using the Irish language. They realised that a coherent Irish culture reinforced the argument for Irish unity and the preservation of a singular Irish identity. To match that, loyalists had to explore their own identity. They were now taking an interest in Ulster Scots, a rural dialect that their forebears had brought from Scotland. Before I left Tyrie, one of his close colleagues came into the room. He remarked that I bore a strong resemblance to Jim Campbell, a former news editor of mine who had been shot and wounded by men of the UDA that Tyrie led, perhaps with Tyrie's approval. The new arrival said, 'Sometimes we drive past Campbell's house and wave to him just to scare the shite out of him.' This was closer to the raw humour of vicious people than the amicable chat I had been having with Tyrie. This man took from his pocket a large brass folding knife, opened it and held the blade up to my face. 'If we just cut off a bit of the beard here and another bit here, you'd look just like Jim Campbell,' he said. I edited the interview and it was broadcast at length. On the day after broadcast the production assistant called me and asked for Tyrie's address. The BBC, which paid interviewees back then, sent him a cheque for £83. A few weeks later, Terry Sharkie, my producer and I went to Moneymore to report on an Orange Ceili, one of those presentations of loyalist culture that Tyrie had spoken of. This was held in the ballroom of a hotel. Tyrie was there. I went over to talk to him and realised that the men around him were not happy with my presumption of familiarity. I said something light-hearted to Tyrie to evoke a similarly friendly response that would reassure these goons that I was no threat. Tyrie said nothing so I walked away. There was further embarrassment that night when I was called out to draw the raffle ticket for a clock made by a loyalist prisoner. This clock was built onto a brass map of Northern Ireland on a wooden plaque. I drew the ticket and to enormous embarrassment my producer Terry Sharkie had the winning ticket. There was stamping of feet and shouts of 'Fenian Fix! The Taigs have got the clock'. But Tyrie's people assured us we had won the clock fair and square and even invited us to stay on. I danced with one of the loyalist women in a cumbersome country waltz. 'We're not sectarian here,' she said. That clock sat on a filing cabinet in the BBC's religious affairs office for about three years and was then blown onto the floor by an IRA bomb in the street below us. In the year before my interview with Tyrie his organisation had shot and killed one Catholic. He was later usurped by more murderous younger members who raised that tally considerably after trying also, and failing, to kill Tyrie himself. Perhaps I had seen a hint of that emerging tension myself, between the cheery bloke that he was when we were alone together and the sterner figure he became when hard men were around. See More: Andy Tyrie, IRA, Ulster