Standing in front of a mural in Belfast of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams could not contain his delight. Puffed up with sanctimony, Sinn Fein‘s former leader was holding a press conference nine days ago after a court case seeking to prove he was a leading light in the Provisional Irish Republican Army suddenly collapsed.
Three victims of IRA atrocities in England, who argued that he was ‘directly responsible’ for three bomb attacks between 1973 and 1996 because he had a senior role in the IRA, withdrew their claim after two weeks in court when they discovered that they could be saddled with Adams’ legal fees of up to £500,000.
At his press conference Adams, 77, brazenly declared a case that had ‘verged on a show trial’ had come to a rightful end, proving ‘I was never a member of the IRA… and have never been a senior, let alone most senior, figure in the IRA’.
However nauseating, it was admittedly a victory of sorts and he will move on.
But Adams knows his critics – including several female members of Sinn Fein – will never let him forget another affair that also involved a court case, one that cannot be brought to such a tidy end.
Regardless of whether he was involved in the IRA or not, he has been at the centre of two child abuse scandals.
And the victims, far from being opponents traumatised by Republican terror attacks, were natural supporters of Sinn Fein. One of them is Adams’ niece.
Their testimony of sex abuse within the Republican movement is a grim mark against Sinn Fein and its former leader, with claims of cover-ups to limit the damage to the political cause.
Gerry Adams held a press conference in front of a mural dedicated to Irish republican hunger striker Bobby Sands on west Belfast’s Falls Road after a civil claims case against him was dropped
It must be stressed that Adams was never involved in any abuse. But what is incontrovertible is that he knew of at least one case of it and failed to speak out about it to the authorities.
The victim in the case closest to Adams was his niece Aine, who was abused by her father – the Sinn Finn figurehead’s younger brother Liam Adams.
Her tragic story can only be told because Aine – now Aine Dahlstrom – agreed to waive anonymity. Yet it was two decades after he first heard of Aine’s allegations against her father in 1987 that Gerry Adams first told police about them in 2007.
And it was nine years after his brother Liam had confessed to him in 2000 that he had abused his daughter that Adams told the police what his brother had said.
The details of Aine’s ordeal could not be more harrowing. Liam, a heavy drinker, began abusing her when she was just four.
At Liam’s trial in 2013 – where he was found guilty of ten offences including rape and gross indecency against his daughter – Aine testified she had been raped when her mother was giving birth to her younger brother in hospital.
She has told how he continued to abuse her ‘as often as he could manage’ for five years until she was nine, including after he split from her mother in 1981.
Aine informed her mother Sally in 1987 and they bravely went together to what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary to report her father.
For a young woman from a staunch Republican family, contacting the RUC was akin to treachery given the political climate in Northern Ireland.
And she found police were more keen on gathering information on her uncle Gerry and the Republican cause than in prosecuting her father for sex abuse.
Appalled at the officers’ priorities, Aine dropped her complaint.
It was two decades later that she approached the police again, by then renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Aine acted because she had discovered her father was working at the west Belfast youth club that her children attended, and was horrified that he could be defiling yet more victims.
She approached journalists, too, going public with the allegations against her father in a TV documentary in 2009.
That year, sensing the heat was on, Liam Adams fled across the border to the Republic – and the authorities’ two year battle to extradite him to face justice ensured the case would remain high-profile.
Gerry Adams’ niece Aine was abused by her father, the former Sinn Fein figurehead’s younger brother Liam Adams
He eventually appeared in the dock in 2013, denying multiple charges of sexual abuse of his daughter, and Gerry Adams gave evidence. The Sinn Fein leader recounted how, after Aine confided in her mother about the abuse at Christmas in 1986, and then told him, they went together to confront his brother in 1987.
Adams confirmed he directly put allegations of abuse to Liam, who denied them.
But Adams added that on a second occasion, on a walk in the rain in 2000 in Dundalk, over the border in County Louth, Liam confessed he had abused Aine.
Adams told the court: ‘I had a long walk with Liam. He acknowledged he had sexually abused Aine. He had molested her, or he had interfered with her, he had sexually assaulted her. He said it only happened the once.’
Under cross-examination, he said he had been unaware Aine’s allegations extended to rape.
Maybe so. But why had Gerry Adams for so long failed to bring Aine’s sex abuse claims to the attention of the authorities?
Adams has said as soon as his family heard of the abuse, a member of the family accompanied Aine and Sally to social services.
Asked in court why he had not informed police of Liam’s admission of abuse for nine years, he replied that the police and social services were aware of his niece’s allegations.
Adams denied he gave the 2009 statement to police ‘to save his political skin’ in the knowledge that the matter was going public.
He has long protested that he distanced himself from his paedophile brother, saying he was estranged from Liam between 1987 and 2002.
But photos produced in evidence at trial captured them together at Liam’s second wedding in 1996 and at a christening of the paedophile’s second daughter in 1997.
They were pictured canvassing together in 1997. Uncomfortably, there was an image of the pair at a formal presentation at a youth club in 2003.
Adams also referred uncritically to Liam 11 times in his 1996 autobiography Before the Dawn. He even added in the acknowledgement: ‘I want also to thank Colette, our Paddy, my father, brothers and sisters, especially Liam.’
And all the time Liam remained an active figure in Sinn Fein, even seeking public office.
Eventually, Liam was given a 16-year sentence. He died of cancer in 2019 aged 63 and Adams attended his funeral. When he was convicted Aine wept, saying: ‘I do not see this as a victory or a celebration as it has taken its toll and has caused hurt, heartache and anguish for all those involved.
Liam (pictured) confessed his crimes to Mr Adams in 2000 but it was nine years before the older brother told police
‘I can now begin my life at 40 and lay to rest the memory of the five-year-old girl who was abused.’
For his part, although a file was prepared, Adams was not charged with withholding information about the case. And yet his niece was not the only sex abuse victim to haunt Gerry Adams’ career.
Former Sinn Fein volunteer Mairia Cahill has written a book, Rough Beast, about her ordeal, which she claims began in 1997 when she was 16 and poised to do her A-levels in Belfast. Ms Cahill, now a journalist, had deep roots in the Republican movement. Her great-uncle Joe was a founder of the Provisional IRA in the 1970s. Gerry Adams was a family friend.
Despite ‘soldiers on street corners and helicopters overhead’, she was a happy teenager doing well at school. Then she became a young Sinn Fein volunteer at a community radio station.
It was there that she began bumping into IRA enforcer Marty Morris, her aunt’s boyfriend.
At the home where she lived with her aunt, he plied her with beer and then molested her after she dozed off on the sofa, she has said. The pattern continued for ten months and led to him raping her. ‘I thought about screaming but was worried he would strangle me,’ Ms Cahill wrote.
She says she had pretend to be asleep – she felt she was distracting him from other younger children in the house.
‘I thought that if I was there on the sofa, then the kids who were staying upstairs were being protected,’ she said.
She dropped out of school and stopped eating properly.
The ‘comradeship’ of Republicanism made it impossible to speak out, Ms Cahill claimed, but she did eventually tell three women privately.
One was her cousin Siobhan O’Hanlon, Gerry Adams’ secretary. Ms Cahill said one day, after the abuse had suddenly stopped, a female IRA member abruptly summoned her. She was 18.
‘My first thought was that I was going to be killed,’ she said.
She was so scared she left a note under her pillow for her mother with the message ‘It was the IRA’, in case she never returned.
The Good Friday agreement might have been signed by the warring parties in Northern Ireland but violence was still used for internal discipline.
She was taken to a flat to be interrogated by two members of the terror group, who told her: ‘We’re here because you’ve made an allegation about Marty Morris.’ Ms Cahill initially refused to speak but her interrogators pressed on in a series of chilling sessions over four months.
They culminated in a kangaroo court – an IRA trial in which she and her abuser Morris were in the same room. He bantered with his IRA colleagues and accused her of lying. Her claims were found inconclusive.
But just two months later two younger teenagers made similar allegations. Still the police were not told. Morris was put under IRA ‘house arrest’. Within five days he disappeared.
And then, according to Ms Cahill, Adams made an appearance, calling her to meet, and making apologies ‘on behalf of the Republican family’. Why was he involved? What was his role in this scandal?
She claimed the whole secret episode left her self-harming and attempting suicide until, in 2009, she decided to contact police after watching Adams’ niece in a TV documentary about her ordeal.
Mairia Cahill, who detailed her sexual abuse in a book titled Rough Beast, pictured with Gerry Adams
According to Aine in the documentary, Gerry Adams had, at one point, put her and Liam in a room together. ‘I went to pieces watching that programme,’ Ms Cahill said. ‘He [Adams] had told me that my case was the only one but now not only was there a similar situation but the person bringing her face-to-face with her abuser was Gerry Adams.’
Morris had moved to London but was eventually charged with offences including rape – only for the case to collapse four years on.
In 2014 Ms Cahill told the whole damning story in a BBC documentary, A Woman Alone with the IRA. To this day she is critical of Sinn Fein.
Adams has denied much of what Ms Cahill claims he said to her, insisting he at one stage passed on advice for her to go to the police, and that there was ‘absolutely no cover-up by Sinn Fein’.
Ms Cahill has said: ‘I don’t think you can call yourself a feminist and still support Sinn Fein while they continue to deny what happened in my case.’
Critics have compared the attitude of the Republican establishment to that of the Catholic church – valuing its own reputation over abuse victims.
Other cases from the Republican movement have emerged. One man has claimed that as a boy, when the IRA used his home in County Louth as a safe house, a paramilitary guest abused him and his brother.
When they complained to IRA leaders they were told there were three choices: The IRA could kill him, the IRA could present him to be killed by the boys – or he could be exiled. Contacting the police was forbidden. Terrified, they chose the man’s exile.
Even one outraged former IRA man Anthony McIntyre said: ‘They couldn’t have the public thinking IRA volunteers raped women and children. So they just covered it up.’
In 2024 former Sinn Fein press officer Michael McMonagle, 44, from Derry, pleaded guilty to attempting to incite a child to engage in sex, and attempted sexual communication with a child.
He was jailed for 18 months – then last October returned to prison for breaking his Sexual Offences Prevention Order after release. Sinn Fein had suspended him after his arrest.
But the party ended up having to apologise after two of his colleagues gave references to get him a new job with the British Heart Foundation as the police investigation continued.
Sinn Fein vice president Michelle O’Neill expressed ‘disgust’ at the revelation and the culprits lost their jobs and party membership.
Ms O’Neil said: ‘There is nothing more reprehensible than the abuse of a child.’
It was an important admission – but evidently something not recognised in the days when Adams held sway over the Republican movement. Regardless of whether he was in the IRA or not.
