Gerry Adams is a charmer. He once gave my wife a flower, a red rose I think it was, as a gift. He’d plucked it from a floral arrangement in Belfast City Hall. The occasion was the formal dinner to mark Alban Maginness’s election as Belfast’s Lord Mayor – 21 years ago.
I was this paper’s editor at the time, and had been seated beside Gerry and his quiet, warm and down-to-earth wife Colette. It’s fair to say that Gerry and I didn’t normally see eye-to-eye on how best to create an Ireland at peace with itself. The table plan, I assume, had been signed off by someone in the SDLP with a sense of humour.
It was a historic evening.
The first Catholic Lord Mayor was some achievement. This was an orange-coloured glass ceiling, well and truly shattered by one of the gentlemen of Irish politics.
There’s nothing the Irish like more than being present at a moment of history. The craic, as they say, was good – and Gerry was entering into the spirit of it. I’d like to think that I reciprocated with a rose for Colette. But I have no memory of that.
I’ve known a few politicians over the years; and one of the common threads I have noticed is the difference between their public persona and their private one.
In a television studio once, Ian Paisley went as close as he dared to saying I’d wanted him shot. (An editorial that week had suggested if he didn’t have anything useful to say, a period of silence was called for. This he translated as “you said you wanted me silenced!”) When the lights went down, he turned into avuncular companion and joked away with me.
Behind the scenes in City Hall, DUP and Sinn Féin members were working together quietly on a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ basis years before they dared be seen together in public. It might have been “a putrid little statelet”, but in truth both of them saw it as their own putrid little statelet.
This weekend sees another of those moments of history. Mary Lou McDonald’s assumption of the presidency of Sinn Féin brings the curtain down on Mr Adams’s remarkable career. It is a career that has taken him from armalite to ballot box in the space of a generation.
Those of us who never bought the legitimacy of the armed struggle find it hard to give the Sinn Féin leader much credit for the peace process. John Hume, a visionary prepared to put country before party (a rare quality in a politician), was the one true author of the Good Friday Agreement. But Mr Adams and Martin McGuinness did a lot of the heavy lifting – and deserve credit for that at least.
It is just a pity the agreement came so late - when so many voices were raised in the seventies and eighties pointing out the futility of trying to coerce a million unionists into a political union with the Republic.
Those attending today’s special ard fheis in Dublin’s RDS will feel the hand of history upon their shoulders – as we did at Alban’s installation dinner. There will be fine words and grand statements; a tear or two perhaps at the passing of the Easter Lily to a new generation
At the time, Alban Maginness’s elevation seemed momentous. But the world did not change for the unionists who felt the loss of the lord mayoralty. And, in truth, it did not change much for the many nationalists who struggle still with poverty, unemployment and a nagging feeling that they do not fully belong in their own city.
The world without Gerry Adams at the helm of Sinn Féin will not be that much different – even if Mary Lou is bringing her own shoes.
If we always do what we’ve always done; we will always get what we’ve always got.
Adams remains an enigma. Charming yet ruthless. Loved and loathed. Public and private. There are many – and not just unionists – who will never be able to reconcile Gerry the peacemaker with the leader of a movement that for so long put ideology before human life.
In a much-celebrated observation, Enoch Powell noted: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.”
Having, in 1984, narrowly avoided being “cut off in midstream”, the jury is still out on whether Gerry Adams’s political career can be judged a success or failure. Final judgment depends on his successor’s ability to break the current deadlock.
