Gerry Adams as Queen Victoria

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday November 24, 2002 19:36 by ...

Paul Durcan's comment on revisionist Sinn Fein

not bothered with link and summary

Poet Durcan sickened by Adams as the Santa Claus of Irish history

IT WAS an attack from visceral depths, a gut-wrench of revulsion at a Sinn Fein publicity stunt. On the Pat Kenny Show, poet Paul Durcan aimed unflinchingly at Sinn Fein's most celebrated figurehead. In an open letter to Gerry Adams and taken from Durcan's diaries, the poet was pulling no punches.

"The stomach of my soul seizes up and I wonder if the neighbours can hear me as I retch," he said. " . . . all those hundreds and hundreds of unique, individual human beings murdered, many of them much more interesting and decent people than you or I, Gerry Adams. All of them dumped into the trashcan of history, their rotting arms and legs hanging out of bins everywhere, on estates and on seashores and on derelict bogs."

At issue was a photograph of Gerry Adams at Stormont, posing with the Sam Maguire Cup and the six-month-old son of Sinn Fein politician Michelle Gildernew. The shot, published on the front page of the Irish Times, was for Paul Durcan the culminating revisionism of 30 years of bloody history, transformed into smiling myth.

"This marvellous photograph of you as a benign, handsome, gentle godfather . . . fills me with such despair that my eyes leak tears," Durcan said, "tears of anguish that you did what you did and that you have been rewarded with victory. I have no choice but to accept your victory but I cannot forgive you for what you did."

Durcan recalled an incident when he was watching the television news in 1976 with his daughter Saorla, then six years old.

On the screen was the image of a pool of blood, and the newsreader announced that a Protestant had been shot dead in Newry. Saorla looked up and asked her father, "What is a Protestant, Daddy?"

"I cannot forgive you," Durcan told Adams in the broadcast. "It's not a matter of intellectual choice; I cannot forgive you." Though the Sinn Fein leader "had lawful ideals", the poet argued, none could justify even a single death. He recalled again the Newry murder in 1976.

"Do you remember the man's name?" he asked. "Let us cradle that man's skull in the Sam Maguire cup . . . and, holding it up to the TV camera, let us contemplate the brain cells of his skull, the beautifully intricate structures of his grey matter, the circuitry of his pre-frontal cortex, the Plasticene of his frontal lobes."

Durcan finished with a vision of the future, a leapfrog forwards to the time when the six-month-old Emmet Gildernew has reached the age of 18.

Sinn Fein would by then be the strongest party in all Ireland, Durcan conjectured.

"You yourself will be in your early 70s and you will be ensconced in Aras an Uachtarain as president of the Republic of Ireland, and all the people will be saying 'Isn't President Adams the best president we've ever had?"' said Paul Durcan.

The poet questioned the decision of the Irish Times to print the publicity photograph so prominently.

It showed Gerry Adams as a father-figure, he said, a model of benevolence, the "Santa Claus of Irish history, father of all that has been, is and is to come".

He went on to describe the picture as depicting the Sinn Fein leader as "the Queen Victoria of modern Irish history, smiling dotingly at his Little Lord Fauntleroy popping up out of the silverware."

"I refuse to accept it, now or ever," Durcan concluded.

STEPHEN DODD