Malachi O'Doherty: Could Gerry Adams be living on borrowed time?

What's the long-term role for the veteran republican in the political process? Malachi O'Doherty explores the options facing the Sinn Fein president

Friday, May 16, 2008

Some people see an analogy with the way in which Eamon de Valera removed himself from the political negotiations that produced partition.

De Valera secured a kind of moral detachment for himself, above the murk of political reality while his chief negotiator, the Martin McGuinness of his day, Michael Collins did the deal and took the consequences.

There is one simple reason why that does not fit the Adams McGuinness partnership; Gerry Adams has accepted the deal. He has not split with McGuinness yet he has not taken up the responsibility for governing Northern Ireland as he was entitled to as party leader.

And this leaves him looking strangely separated from the main political action. He does not sit at the Executive table.

He is not a member of any committee.

He may feel that he can float presidentially over the heads of the political workers, in order to retain the big picture.

Perhaps, but the danger for him surely is that the workers themselves might cease to feel that they need him.

The oddity of his position is concealed by the fact that another party leader, Mark Durkan, does the same, but he has not surrendered the prize that Adams has. Another theory is that Adams has simply made a mistake. There were to be two parts to the project; securing a deal in the North and taking a ministerial post in the Dail. Had that plan worked, we might have seen Gerry Adams as Tanaiste, sitting across the table from Deputy First Minister McGuinness at cross-border meetings.

Instead we have McGuinness inheriting his share and Adams looking like a wallflower.

But there is some merit for nationalism in what he has done.

By retaining a heavy hitter outside the Executive, Sinn Fein presents the party as numerically balanced with the DUP, whose party leader is on the Executive.

This cosmetically disguises the fact that Sinn Fein is the smaller party and that unionism has a majority in Stormont. It may not have been planned that way, but it works that way.

Gerry Adams rises to his feet from the front bench and looks like the leader of his side of the house, inflating the impression of an executive presence. Durcan does the same. But is it good for government and even for the Sinn Fein party that Adams stays outside the Executive?

He appoints the Sinn Fein ministers and only he can sack them, yet he does not supervise them at the Executive table.

Consider this feasible scenario.

Pressure builds within the Assembly for the resignation of a Sinn Fein minister, say — merely for purposes of illustration — the Education Minister, Caitriona Ruane.

The Deputy First Minister, the most senior Sinn Fein member of the Executive, approaches the party leader and asks him to remove the minister.

Suppose the party leader doesn't want to remove the minister.

The separation of the roles of party leader and Deputy First Minister in Sinn Fein creates the potential for every crisis on the Executive to compromise the authority of the party leader or the Deputy First Minister.

And the party must be aware of that vulnerability, must ultimately want what every other government has got, the power for the removal and appointment of ministers to reside within the Executive.

How would Gordon Brown or Brian Cowan like it if senior party officials could veto their ministerial appointments? They would not accept it.

Theoretically, Gerry Adams can even remove Martin McGuinness. It is inconceviable that he would try.

And a further uneasy thought occurs to anyone reflecting on this problem.

Surely, Gerry Adams's political career is entirely oppositional and subversive.

So can he be trusted outside the Executive to make decisions which are in the best interests of the Executive?

Look at some of the political antics he has got involved in since the Executive was established.

His campaign for truth was ridiculed as a campaign for half-truth, because he wanted to pressurise the British into disclosing their own sins and secrets while continuing to deny that he had ever been a member of the IRA. It was laughable.

The parade organised in Belfast in support of this campaign was flanked by men with berets and rifles, presumably replica rifles, though the police usually do not presume that rifles exposed in the street are replicas.

The campaign itself appears to have withered away, but looked too much from the start like the work of someone with time on his hands.

Gerry Adams has been the president of Sinn Fein for 23 years.

In all that time he has never been challenged from within the party. Only Popes and dictators usually last so long unchallenged.

And since he is now the last of those who negotiated the agreements who is still in place, speculation has begun about who might replace him.

And would the replacement stand outside the Executive, as another conspicuous waste of talent, or take a seat and put an end to presidential detachment and the risks accruing from it?

And would the new party leader not want to choose a new Executive rather than inherit one that had the stamp of Gerry Adams all over it? Adams may not be planning to go for some time; it appears likely, though, that when he does, others will go with him.

'No bad thing', is what many in the education sector would think of that.

And who would succeed him?

If the selection was made on merit, it would have to be Conor Murphy, though he'd look shaky if a future prosecution for the murder of Paul Quinn was to cast doubt on the fulsome assurances he gave us that the IRA had had nothing to do with it.

And west Belfast, long used to being at the centre of the republican universe, would surely feel the loss of that position.

All of which adds up to suggesting that, though Gerry Adams may not want to go yet, it will be a big news week in Northern Ireland when he does.