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
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.
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