‘I don’t distance myself from the IRA’: Gerry Adams brings his ‘dead true’ denials to court | Esther Addley

‘I don’t distance myself from the IRA’: Gerry Adams brings his ‘dead true’ denials to court Former politician tells court he was never a member of the IRA in case brought by survivors of republican bombings “A very happy St Patrick’s Day,” said Gerry Adams , as he took his seat in the stand of court 16 in the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday. Mr Justice Smith hadn’t quite caught what the defendant said, and asked him to repeat himself. “Oh that’s very kind of you,” the judge stammered when he finally worked it out. The green tie and small sprig of shamrock in Adams’s lapel – worn alongside a Palestinian flag pin – ought perhaps to have been a clue. Adams used to spend 17 March at the White House, glad-handing a succession of thematically dressed presidents and supportive senators of Irish extraction. This year, though, the former Sinn Féin president had a prior engagement in a British courtroom. It was not a criminal dock, as some of those present in the public benches – who included the relatives of people murdered by the IRA during the Troubles – would certainly have preferred. Adams is being sued in the civil high court in London by three surviving victims of IRA bombings, who want the judge to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the former president of Sinn Féin was also a former senior IRA leader and, as such, could be held personally liable for their injuries. Money may not be immediately at stake – the three claimants are seeking symbolic damages of £1 – but for Adams, 77, the potential cost is still extremely high. For more than five decades, in defiance of the flat assertions of multiple former allies, foes and journalists that he had a senior operational role in the IRA during what he described in court as “the war”, Adams has insisted he was never a member of the republican paramilitary group. Anyone who expected him to concede anything different under oath was going to be disappointed. Previous witnesses, including a former IRA bomber, for...