Gerry Adams is very much a man of his own and place. He is often critically compared with his long-time Bete noire Ian Paisley; largely because whilst the latter is viewed as a purely political figure, Adams is judged through the prism of a militarised movement that sought and took lives in its political cause. The truth, as I tried to tease out in my portrait of Paisley for Prospect magazine a few years back, is rather more complex.
Adams was only 16 years of age when Paisley threatened to march into the lower Falls to remove a tricolour from a Republican election office during the election campaign of 1964. The riots that followed its forcible removal by the police were a formative event in the lives of many of Adams' generation. As a interviewee, his skills owe more to the interrogation rooms of Castlereagh RUC Barracks than slick media trainers. He rarely intentionally gives hostages to fortune. On Sunday night Adams, whose public role has receded somewhat as the Stormont Executive continues under the joint leadership of his party colleague, deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, and First Minister Peter Robinson, was interviewed by Gay Byrne, once a leading interlocutor of Ireland's national conscience.
It was billed as a rematch for a combative encounter on Byrne's Late Late Show back in 1994, when Byrne, the son of a Irish soldier who served under the crown during the first world war, had famously refused to shake Adams hand. Yet for a man coming from a background such fundamentalist certainty, it is Adams' moral relativism that strikes you most. Indeed, he seems equivocal about almost everything, except the idea that he was ever in the IRA. Although he praised the Methodists, ("they're the best") and Presbyterians for their democratic governance, he sounded more like the agnostic former Bishop of Durham, expressing uncertainty about whether Jesus was the son of man or indeed the existence of a God at all.
One suspects that, like Paisley, no official church theology could hold him that he was not also head of. The liberal philosopher Bertrand Russell has proposed that a difference broadly persists between "Catholic and Protestant sceptics". He contrasted the dour utilitarianism of Mills with the cheerful scepticism of Montaigne and the libertine Voltaire. Russell describes the difference thus:
One may say, broadly speaking, that Protestants like to be good and have invented theology to keep themselves so, whereas Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbours good. The chief distinction that one notices is that in the Protestant type departure is primarily intellectual, whereas in the Catholic type it is primarily practical.
It's a liberal inheritance still revered by many secular Protestants in Northern Ireland that is often cited as a primary reason for not wanting to leave a liberal British state. Adams, on the other hand, is a practical dissenter from what has often been a vehemently anti-Republican, authoritarian Irish Catholic church. As a political leader, Adams makes no pretensions to being a philosopher king, but his concluding remarks in the Byrne video are revealing nonetheless:
Maybe God's in everyone. Maybe the judgment's in all of us. I would like to think that if there is a day of judgment, the judge would be the small woman in Ballymurphy, you know, or someone who represents that type of natural justice, as opposed to a punishing, vengeful, righteous, negative. You know, we shouldn't fear God. Not God.
Then Byrne asks, "Suppose it's all true? And you end up meeting God, what do you think you'll say to him?" "Or Her. Well, I've been in many courts at many times and I would just say 'I did my best. And here I am. And let me in.'"
An order given with the authority of a leader of his own secular church? Or a moral relativist who plans to confront his maker with his own moral autonomy still firmly intact? Either way it puts him a long way from Ireland's long-lost and original Republicans.
Clarification, 17:30, 21/04/09: A reader has pointed out that Byrne's father, described by the author "a British soldier", was in fact an Irishman who served alongside the British. The text has been changed to reflect this
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