My mother, who died last autumn, was a lifelong republican and a sister of veteran IRA leader Joe Cahill, so her wake in Belfast was naturally attended by many people whose political sympathies and beliefs are, to say the least, markedly different to mine.

Nothing was said, on either side, because funerals aren't the time or place; even Gerry Adams managed a ‘good night, girls’ to me and my sister as he left the house after paying his respects.

But in Northern Ireland it’s impossible not to be conscious of the tensions which such a situation exposes. There were a few dirty looks from some of the people who came to the house, let's put it that way.

Among the visitors during that awful week was the woman who has now gone public with her claims of having been raped in her teens by an IRA member, and then being badly treated in response by Sinn Fein, who effectively, she says, shielded her rapist from justice.

She herself is a relative of Joe Cahill, which perhaps made her cavalier treatment at the hands of the IRA all the more unexpected.

I was aware for a long time that she had been the victim of a sexual assault in the past, and I knew he identity of her alleged attacker, though I didn't know all the details until recently, or the full extent of the republican movement's complicity in covering it up. I was also conscious that her experience was not unusual.

It certainly didn't surprise me that the Provos would act in such a way; in fact, it was exactly what I would have expected. That's the nature of life in a ghetto run by fanatical gunmen. Justice is what they say it is. If you don't like it, get out. Or at least, keep your mouth shut, or there's someone who'll shut it for you. Permanently.

But here's what I could never understand. Most of those individuals who attended my mother's wake had heard the same stories and scandals that I had and more besides — because I moved away from republican Belfast physically and psychologically and politically a long time ago, and they stayed right in the heart of it. They knew better than I did the myriad ways in which the authority figures they respected and held up as icons of political virtue had turned a blind eye to appalling abuses — yet they remained true to the republican faith.

Including the woman who has now spoken so painfully of what happened to her, who has been keen to stress her continuing loyalty to the republican movement.

Knowing all they did, they still bought into the myth of the republican family, even when they could see that the republican family tree was rotten to the core, and when it was clear that certain people in that family tree had a special branch all of their own, where they were protected from the consequences of their worst actions.

They could internalise the things they knew, and then kind of not know them any more, in order not to let anything damage the struggle.

In that respect, why is there astonishment that Gerry Adams behaved the way that he did?

He's one of the world's most successful revolutionary leaders, who came, like Fidel Castro, through slaughter and bloodshed to become a well-fed, well-paid scion of the movement that he helped to forge. You don't get there by being soft and squishy inside and letting the interests of one victim or 1,000 victims — however traumatic — override the interests of the cause.

Sergey Nechayev, the 19th century Russian nihilist, who wrote his Catechism of the Revolutionary as a blueprint for the destruction of society, described such a man best: "All the tender and effeminate emotions of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude, and even honour, must be stilled in him by a cold and single-blooded passion."

As it happens, we know that the bond of kinship does survive, because Adams, as the evidence now seems incontrovertible, treated his brother Liam differently from any other person in west Belfast who had been accused of the abuse of his own child; and he was also prepared to continue to publicly eulogise their father, despite now admitting that the man was a sadistic brute and sexual predator who abused some of his own children.

Even so, Nechayev's words still ring chillingly true. The only ultimate love is for the revolution; the necessities of struggle transcend all other considerations.

Adams could eulogise monsters because the eulogies served a cause which needed to sentimentalise where it came from in order to justify what it was doing. In that way, he was no different from the community he represented. He was the same, only more so.

The fact that protecting women and children was secondary to the cause was not even something which the Provos ever tried to hide. Mairead Farrell, the IRA terrorist who was shot dead by an undercover SAS unit while on a bombing mission in Gibraltar in 1988, put that explicitly when asked about her feminism: "We can't successfully end our oppression as women until we first end the oppression of our country." Everything had to wait.

So no, none of this is very surprising. The whole conflict was founded upon, and sustained by, the abuse of innocents. The only shock is learning that the Sinn Fein member who has now been suspended from the party following fresh accusations of child abuse is a woman.

I just presumed it would be a man. But after all, sexual violence and terrorism are inextricably linked, so why should it be any shock to find that the women who get involved in revolutionary politics might be tainted by the same sick pathologies?

American poet and feminist Robin Morgan made a fair fist of nailing that culture in The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. She overstates her case by trying to show that terrorism is the logical outcome of a patriarchal society which has gone technological; her tendency to see every missile as a phallic weapon becomes almost comical after a while; and nobody buys any more that sentimental nonsense about female values being the answer to every ill that exists in society.

But, even taking all that into account, it's hard to argue with Morgan's underlying thesis that terrorism embodies the ‘eroticisation of violence’. The terrorist, she says, “emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration, he excites the thrill of fear’’.

Terrorists, like sexual abusers, like doing unspeakable things to human flesh. It's just that politics gives one side of the same perverted coin a convenient excuse. It's certainly no coincidence that so many women get turned on by violent men, or that other violent men rally round to hush up their crimes.

Islamic suicide bombers take this diseased sexuality to its ultimate conclusion by turning their very bodies into weapons.

In retrospect, it's a pity that the IRA's heroes didn't have the courage of their convictions to adopt the same methods themselves, because then there would have been fewer of them around to rape women and children, and fewer to cover up for their abusive comrades afterwards.

But then the IRA always were cowards. They didn't mind who died for the cause, just so long as it wasn't them. What's emerging now is only scratching the surface of their vicious collective history.

As the Catholic Church found out before them, once the floodgates open, there's no closing them again.