For a semi-geriatric unpublished author, it gives me little pleasure to note that Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has a new book out called ‘The little book of Tweets’. I have to be careful here to tread the line between bitterness and overestimation of my own talent and, at the same time, to recognise that Mr Adams is slightly more well known than I am.
It is important to point out that Adams has no connections with the IRA and was never a member of both the organisation or the IRA Army Council and never, oh no, never had any dealings with any of the bombings that took place all over the place, including London. Let’s get that out of the way, first. He’s a decent, law-abiding chap who wouldn’t say boo to a member of the UVF. And he’s already published a shed load of books with such titles as ‘A Pathway To Peace’ and ‘Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland’. A peace loving man, is our Gerry. Otherwise why would the current Labour leadership have cosied up to him on behalf of no one but themselves when the IRA were in the midst of their murderous reign?
I dread to think what Adams’ tweets would have been like during ‘the troubles’. What would he have tweeted then? It would hardly have been appropriate to tweet semi-humourous comments about mass murder and carnage inflicted often upon innocent people.
The reason for the publication of Adams’ tweets is simple: his publishers believe there is a market for them. I am assuming most of the potential buyers will never have seen twitter, otherwise they would not realise just how dull the tweets are.
I sense some form of attempt at rehabilitation on his part. Somehow Martin McGuinness managed it, to the point when he could even share a joke in public with Ian Paisley. Forget the past, become all hale and hearty and suddenly yesterday’s terrorist – well, Gerry Adams is not a terrorist; let’s be clear about that – and suddenly he is less harmful than his fellow Irishman Daniel O’Donnell.
It’s easier to forgive than to forget. I find it hard to forgive and impossible to forget and how could you? Think about the Omagh bombing. It is true that the murder of 29 people, including a woman carrying twins, was carried out by an offshoot of the IRA and not the IRA itself but there were plenty of other atrocities over the years. Somehow, I can’t separate the gurning face of Gerry Adams from the carnage that occurred around him. I don’t look at his tweets in the same way as I might enjoy someone who didn’t enjoy some sort of relationship, no matter how tenuous, with a bunch of murderers.
