Gerry Adams Has Long Denied Being a Member of the I.R.A. but His Former Compatriots Say That He Authorized Murder. in the March
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For Immediate Release: March 9, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 Gerry Adams Has Long Denied Being a Member of the I.R.A. But His Former Compatriots Say That He Authorized Murder. In the March 16, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “Where the Bodies Are Buried” (p. 42), Patrick Radden Keefe reports from Belfast and investigates the alleged involvement of Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican move- ment, in the Irish Republican Army and in the murders perpetrated by that organization during the conflict known as the Troubles. “Though Adams is the most famous face of the Irish Republican movement, he has long denied having been a member of the I.R.A.,” Keefe writes. “He maintains that he never played any operational role in the violence of the Troubles, and that he confined himself to the leadership of Sinn Fein.” Keefe examines the killing, in 1972, of Jean McConville, a thirty-seven-year-old widow and mother of ten who was kidnapped and executed by members of a secret I.R.A. unit called the Unknowns. According to former members of the Unknowns, including the late I.R.A. terrorist Dolours Price, Adams was their Officer Commanding. In Northern Ireland, where roughly thirty-six hundred people were murdered during the Troubles and some forty thousand wounded, there has been no comprehensive accounting for expansive crimes that took place. Keefe reports that Belfast is a city that remains deeply marred by unresolved conflict. In 2001, administrators at Boston College approached Ed Moloney, a veteran Irish journalist and author of a landmark revisionist account, “A Secret History of the IRA,” about creating an oral-history project that would gather accounts by paramilitaries from both sides of the Troubles. Many of the combatants were still alive, and their testimony could provide an unparalleled resource for future historians—an exception to the rule of omertà. Given the sensitivities, Moloney decided, each interview would have to be conducted in secret and remain secret until the participant died. “These people could be shot if it was discovered they were talking to us,” Moloney tells Keefe. “They were taking a huge risk.” Keefe had access to the oral history that the late Brendan Hughes, a lifelong I.R.A. fighter known as the Dark, provided to Boston College, and introduces details and passages from the oral history that have never been revealed before. During a conversation between Hughes and Anthony McIntyre, a former I.R.A. volunteer who spent seventeen years in prison for murder, the subject turned to McConville’s death. “There was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed,” Hughes told McIntyre. “That fucking man is now the head of Sinn Fein.” According to Keefe, Hughes felt betrayed by Adams, who, in denying his I.R.A. past, left Hughes and others “to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.” Everybody knows that Adams was in the I.R.A., Hughes told McIntyre: “The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs know it.” Adams was not charged in the death of McConville, whose remains were discovered in 2013, and the murder investigation did not set back Sinn Fein: “the Party did surprisingly well in the 2014 elections, winning more seats than expected,” Keefe writes. “Today, it is the most popular political party in Ireland.” In most countries, merely being implicated in a mur- der would be enough to derail a political career. But, Keefe notes, Adams has a knack for weath- ering scandals. “I don’t know what the Irish word for Teflon is,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says. “But he has it.” Michael McConville, Jean’s son, tells Keefe that he does not believe that Adams or anyone else will be brought to account for the murder of his mother. “We’re all adults here—we all know the score,” he says. The Warburg Is Britain’s Most Eccentric and Original Library. Can It Survive? In “In the Memory Ward” (p. 34), Adam Gopnik visits the Warburg Institute, in London, and explores the unique library’s history and uncertain future. Begun at the start of the last century, in Hamburg, by Aby Warburg, a wealthy Jewish banker’s son, the Warburg is “a library like no other in Europe—in its cross-disciplinary reference, its peculiarities, its originality, its strange depths and unexpected shallows,” Gopnik writes. In the past several years, however, the War- burg’s future has been fiercely contested. The fight over the future of the library came to a cli- max in the past few months, but it started seven years ago, when the Warburg Institute and then the University of London began to seek legal counsel in order to clarify the terms of the trust deed that, in 1944, as the Second World War raged, had brought the Warburg into the univer- sity. Last year, the university initiated a lawsuit, thinking to “converge” the Warburg’s books into its larger library system and to continue charging the Warburg a very large fee for the use of its LINIERS building. A public outcry, which reached beyond the academic community, ensued. The decision about the library’s fate came down in early November. “It was, remarkably, almost entirely in favor of the institute,” Gopnik writes. “The judge found the University of London responsible for the Warburg’s upkeep, its continuation, and its integrity.” Last week, it was announced that a new director had been cho- sen, from outside the institute: David Freedberg, a distinguished art historian who has been resident for many years at Columbia Univer- sity. “My dream of reviving the Warburg is a dream of making it the center of vigorous and vital cultural history in our time,” Freedberg tells Gopnik, adding, “It can be, and, I hope, will be, more engaged with contemporary issues than it has ever been before.” The historian Lisa Jardine tells Gopnik that she has a “hard time believing that in the next five to ten years the situation will not arise again. Unless, of course, a major benefactor is found.” Plus: In Comment, Amy Davidson reflects on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech before Congress, and con- siders the complexities of creating a timely deal that would stave off a nuclear-armed Iran (p. 19); Jill Lepore examines the arguments of several recent books on income inequality in the U.S., and discusses why the gap between the rich and the poor persists (p. 26); in Shouts & Murmurs, Ian Frazier remembers the innocent days of his youth, when he was sixty-three (p. 33); Daniel Mendelsohn reflects on how personal Sappho’s erotic poetry actually is (p. 70); Thomas Mallon reads the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s newest work, “The Discreet Hero” (p. 78); Hilton Als reviews Larry David’s self-penned Broadway début, “Fish in the Dark,” and Peter Morgan’s “The Au- dience,” starring Helen Mirren (p. 84); Peter Schjeldahl attends “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky,” at the Metropolitan Mu- seum (p. 86); Anthony Lane watches “Cinderella” and “It Follows” (p. 88); and fiction by Sarah Braunstein (p. 62). Online: On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Laura Secor and Steve Coll discuss Iran and Netanyahu. Tablet and Phone Extras: A slide show of “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky”; Sarah Braunstein reads her short story; Lee Upton reads his poem; and Richard Brody picks his Movie of the Week, William Greaves’s “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” from 1968. The March 16, 2015, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, March 9. DAVID BORCHART DAVID.