Voices
On Good Friday morning I travelled North to meet Gerry Adams. The rendezvous point was Parliament Buildings on the Stormont Estate. I arrived to what seemed like the winners’ enclosure.
A ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement was underway. Sinn Féin were as comfortable in their surroundings as the merchant princes are in Cork and the Conservatives in Westminster. One of their own was the organiser-in-chief of proceedings.
There were shinners everywhere. Pat Doherty, a key republican during the past five decades and a former Sinn Féin West Tyrone MP, came out of retirement and travelled from north Donegal. Mitchel McLaughlin, a former Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly and another with a long list of stories that will never be told, made the journey from Derry. He was accompanied by a fellow Derry veteran, Dominic Doherty. Michelle Gildernew, the Fermanagh-Tyrone MP, and her Mid Ulster colleague at Westminster, Francie Molloy, were also there.
Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald brought her mother, Joan, from Dublin. The party’s leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, had a special reason to be happy. Earlier that day, she had become a Good Friday grandmother.
Among those seated prominently at the ceremony in the Great Hall were personalities from the era when the UUP was the dominant unionist voice – Sir Reg Empey, Michael McGimpsey and Danny Kennedy. The most accomplished drafter of SDLP policy, a former Deputy First Minister, Mark Durkan, was also there.
Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach at the time of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, and former Progressive Democrats Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Liz O’Donnell, travelled from Dublin. Billy Hutchinson, one of the influential loyal persuaders, was also on the guest list, as was Jeanette Ervine, the widow of the Progressive Unionist Party leader, David, and her family.
The person credited with organising what was an inclusive event was the Speaker of the mothballed Assembly – Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey.
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Twenty-five years ago, the republican movement was on its slow, sometimes stop-start journey from what it called “armed struggle” to political means. As the negotiations chaired by Senator George Mitchell reached their make-or-break stage, space had to be built in to allow Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams depart to consult with their acquaintances in the IRA.
One of the most contentious Sinn Féin demands in the negotiations was that paramilitaries serving lengthy prison sentences for crimes including murder would be released on licence. Both Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern recognised that for any agreement to work, the faction responsible for most of the killings – republicans – would have to be brought inside the tent and sign up for a deal that welded them to politics.
Last week’s Good Friday gathering at Stormont showed how effectively Sinn Féin has bought into that structure.
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It would be difficult to find a better example of Sinn Féin’s journey from unruly outsiders to Stormont corporate box owners than Alex Maskey. Born in Belfast in 1952, his working life began as a labourer in Belfast docks and as a barman. He was an accomplished boxer in his youth, a trait that occasionally proved useful in his later life.
Twice in the 1970s, he was interned. He has never denied his IRA past. But he quickly became prominent in Sinn Féin’s political journey and, in June 1983, he became the party’s first elected member to Belfast City Council since the 1920s. In my presence, a unionist Councillor recalled the atmosphere in Belfast City Hall in the 1980s, when disagreement among elected representatives in the chamber sometimes led to fist fights.
Maskey was a known friend of Gerry Adams. In 1987 and again in 1988, loyalists tried to kill him, injuring him with a shotgun blast during one of the attacks. In 1993, they made their third attempt. He was living in Anderstown at the time and a friend, Alan Lundy, was building a porch on Maskey’s house in Gartree Place to provide additional security. When the gang arrived, they quickly shot Lundy in the back, fatally wounding him in front of Maskey’s children, and then ran into the house, hunting their target. They searched the upstairs bedrooms but failed to check the bathroom where he was hiding.
In October 1997, six months before the Good Friday Agreement, Maskey was part of Sinn Féin’s negotiating team. At the time, during an interview with the Independent on Sunday, Maskey said:
“I got a sawn-off shotgun blast in the stomach, I lost half a kidney, half my bowel and I still have shrapnel in me. I lost my good friend, Alan Lundy. I’m here trying to reach out to people associated with organisations who spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to assassinate me. I’m trying to get on with people who tried to murder me, and that’s because I want to make sure others don’t have to endure the suffering that we have. We now have an opportunity to break the logjam.”
In 2002, Alex Maskey became the first Sinn Féin representative to serve as Mayor of Belfast. That year, part of his duties included opening the annual Presbyterian General Assembly and laying a wreath at the cenotaph memorial, alongside Belfast City Hall, in memory of those who died at the Battle of the Somme.
He was first elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in November 2003. Sixteen years later, in January 2020, Maskey was elected Speaker at Stormont. Power-sharing was being restored, following a three-year closure linked to the Renewable Health Incentive (cash for ash) controversy. He announced on September 23, 2021 that he wouldn’t contest the May 2022 Assembly elections.
Because of the DUP boycott of the Assembly, he hasn’t yet had the chance to pass on the baton to a successor in the Speaker role. So, by default, he remains in the position even though he is no longer an Assembly member. As a result, when King Charles visited Northern Ireland last September during the mourning period immediately after his mother’s death, Alex Maskey, in his role as Assembly Speaker, was the first political representative to meet the new British monarch.
In the same way, it fell to Maskey to organise the Good Friday Agreement reunion event at Stormont.
The DUP was the only one of the five main parties to turn down his invite.
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William Cherry’s excellent photograph captures Gerry Adams in reflective mode, right hand under his chin, at the Good Friday gathering in Stormont’s Great Hall. Monica McWilliams, a founding member of the Women’s Coalition, sits to his right. Beyond them is a portrait of the late Martin Mc Guinness.
Seven years after the death of McGuinness, Adams still misses him. Their bond was unique. While they were wired differently, neither ever criticised or undermined the other in public or in private. Aged 74, Adams has lost several family members and close friends in the course of his life. But the death of McGuinness, from cancer-related factors in March 2017, was probably the deepest cut of all.
While he is a known public figure, admired by some, despised by others, Adams has a very private side. His wife, Colette, avoids the limelight. Their son, Gearóid and their grandchildren do likewise. He is as protective of them as he is sealed about aspects of his republican past.
It’s five years since he stood down as Sinn Féin president, vacating the space to allow Mary Lou McDonald to take over. He retired as Sinn Féin TD for Louth in 2020. In the immediate aftermath, he practically disappeared from public life – a strategy that suited the party as it concentrated on growth south of the border.
But in recent times, in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement 25th anniversary events, Adams resurfaced. He said yes to interview requests from the likes of BBC Northern Ireland’s Mark Simpson and Freya Mc Clements, the Northern Editor of The Irish Times. He made himself available for television documentaries about the Agreement on RTÉ and the BBC. He also featured in an impressive RTÉ television programme about the late Redemptorist priest, Fr Alec Reid, who had a unique role in the peace process.
Adams accepted an invitation to speak alongside former US President Bill Clinton in New York on April 3. The “Reflections of the Good Friday Agreement – 25 years of Peace & Progress” event was held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, one of the most prestigious US colleges. It was organised by seven leading Irish-American organisations, including Friends of Sinn Féin, the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians, the James Connolly Labour Coalition and the Brehon Law Society.
He still had some signs of transatlantic jet-lag when we met last Friday. His back was bothering him. Richard McAuley, his friend from childhood days and his ever-present sherpa for many decades, was complaining of knee problems.
The three of us sat chatting on a wall to the left of the main entrance to the Stormont building, grateful for the late afternoon sun and the absence of wind.
Adams’ decision to vacate his role as a West Belfast Assembly member and successfully seek a Louth Dáil seat coincided with the beginning of a spectacular Sinn Féin growth spurt in the south. When Adams fronted their 2011 campaign Sinn Féin were defending five Dáil seats. When he decided to retire seven years later, the party had 24 TDs.
But Mary Lou McDonald’s chances of making it into government after the next General Election may be inextricably linked to Adams and a cohort of his generation of republicans receding into Sinn Féin’s past.
He is energised by the debate about Irish unity and has attended a number of recent events, north of the border. He takes heart from the contribution of some of the attendees from a unionist background, but accepts that in a Westminster context, many of them would be instinctively anti-Tory and pro-Labour.
He made a point of referencing two Referendum events involving Northern Ireland voters:
- In 1998 71 per cent of voters supported the Good Friday Agreement;
- In 2016, 56 per cent of voters favoured remaining part of the European Union.
Those two results are a source of encouragement to Adams. But when we discussed the possible outcomes of a border poll and a result that could leave large swathes of the unionist community feeling homeless and stateless, the conversation took an unexpected twist.
In theory, a simple majority – 50 per cent plus one of those who vote – could set Northern Ireland on course to be part of a united Ireland. (A referendum would also be required in the south).
In the final years of his life, the former SDLP leader, Seamus Mallon, expressed his doubts about such a formula. He articulated his views in his memoir A Shared Home Place. Mallon said the margin would have to be greater than the 50 per cent plus one formula to give the dramatic constitutional changes involved a realistic chance of success.
In our Good Friday conversation at Stormont, Gerry Adams expressed an opinion similar to the Mallon view. Adams’s assessment is that significantly more than 50 per cent of Northern Ireland’s voters would have to say “Yes” in a unity referendum to provide the necessary foundations for historic change. It is a noteworthy view from the most important republican of modern times.
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Two weeks ago in Boston, the new US Northern Ireland envoy, Joe Kennedy, suggested the next phase of the peace process should incorporate parity of opportunity as well as parity of esteem.
Gerry Adams, the complex master of the long game, may be incorporating the same principles into his views about Irish unity.
As the Good Friday gathering in Stormont’s Parliament buildings showed, Sinn Féin has become comfortable in Stormont’s Parliament buildings. But it is a neutered institution without the participation of the DUP.
Any version of a new Ireland without significant buy-in from unionism would struggle to achieve its potential.
Further reading
Saying “yes” or “maybe” instead of “no” is the core legacy of the Good Friday Agreement
