My uncle, Michael Lennon, fought with Eamon DeValera in Boland's Mill in Dublin during the 1916 Rising. As a young fellow I worshipped Michael for his struggle for Irish freedom. In the intervening years, having sat beside too many empty chairs, I wished that he had stayed at home.
Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein, sees himself as a successor of Michael Lennon. But 98 years after the Rising, Adams was last week arrested for questioning about the 1972 murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, living in a run-down block of flats. The IRA accused her of giving information to the British army, kidnapped her in front of her children, shot her in the back of the head and buried her in a beach. They did not tell her family what had happened to her. She was one of the 'disappeared'. Her children were put in care.
Adams vehemently denies any involvement in her murder. He also denies he was ever in the IRA. I know no one who believes this latter claim.
His arrest was linked to taped interviews made by historians working in Boston College. In these Brendan Hughes claims Adams was a senior commander in the IRA in Belfast and was directly implicated in McConville's murder. Hughes had no problem with the killing because he agreed with shooting informers and made no distinction between men and women. But he did have a problem with Adams' denials of IRA membership.
At the time of the murder, and since, a central plank of Republican demands has been for due process, and — often correctly — they criticise failures of the British Government in this respect.
Republicans cry foul play over Adams' arrest for several reasons: the absence of arrests of security force members for atrocities such as Bloody Sunday, the failure to hold inquests for many killed by the British, the refusal of the British Government to release documents. They also allege that the timing of the arrest was politically motivated: three weeks before European and local elections, in both Northern Ireland and the South.
At the root of all this lies the problem of the past: how do we deal with it? The 1998 Agreement was a political compromise. Like all such settlements it failed to be just in many ways. People from all sides who had lost loved ones saw their killers given early release from prison. There were suspicions that