Gerry Adams awarded €100k (£84,000 ) in libel case against the BBC
Well, I suppose a retired supporter of the IRA murder gangs does need money to live in the style that he has become accustomed to as the ‘Advocate General’ of the Sinn Fein/IRA propaganda machine for half a century!!
In the BBC programme, broadcast in September 2016, an anonymous source given the pseudonym Martin claimed the shooting of former Sinn Fein official Denis Donaldson, was sanctioned by the political and military leadership of the IRA and that Mr Adams “gives the final say”.
In his directions to the jury, trial judge, Judge Alexander Owens, ‘told the jury that the BBC had put forward the position that Mr Adams had “no reputation at all” and the broadcaster had argued to the jury that it should award only nominal damages, putting forward the option of just one euro.’
The BBC reports that ‘Mr Justice Alexander Owens blocked three people appearing as witnesses, including Denis Donaldson’s daughter who wanted to testify as part of the BBC’s defence.
However, the judge ruled what she intended to say was irrelevant in respect of what the jury had to consider.
The BBC also wanted to call Austin Stack, whose father Brian, a prison officer, was fatally wounded in an IRA gun attack in Dublin in 1983.
It also attempted to call Eunan O’Halpin, a professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College, Dublin.’
Mr Justice Owens said “a person’s reputation can change” and the jury should “evaluate” it as of “2016 and now”.
I think that the judge should go and read what the Lord says in Jeremiah 13:23.
“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”
Any honest person, who has followed the speeches and actions of Gerry Adams since the beginning of the ‘Troubles’ here in Ulster, right now up to the present time, will have no difficulty in saying that Adams is one leopard that most certainly has not changed his spots.
An article has appeared in yesterday’s ‘Belfast Telegraph’ in which journalist, Sam McBride succinctly sums up Gerry Adams!
Gerry Adams is a man of towering ambition who’d no moral qualms about securing his goal through murder
Bias
The trial being sited in Dublin, in the minds of most, assured an Adams’ ‘victory’!
That, coupled with the notion that Adams had changed, a suggestion that was surely is to be found in the trial judge’s words to the jury, brought about today’s example of ‘Irish Justice’!
Support from the beginning
Since the beginning of the troubles, the Irish Republic’s ‘status quo’ has aided the IRA. It helped to arm them from tits earliest days. It has provided cover and safety for those who raided across the border, leaving widows and orphans in their wake.
To this day, atrocities like the murder of Paul Quinn (1986 – 2007), a young Roman Catholic man from County Armagh, remains unsolved. He was lured to a farm at Tullycoora, in Co Monaghan where a group of some ten or more men beat him with iron and nail-studded bars for upwards of half an hour, breaking every major bone in his body. He was taken at around 18:00 to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, where he died two hours later.
His family subsequently accused the Provisional IRA of his murder. No one has ever been convicted in relation to his death. It is commonly perceived that the authorities in the Irish Republic did strive too hard to solve the murder that took place in their territory.
Kingsmill
Then there has been the Kingsmill massacre, when eleven Protestant workmen were taken from a bus and shot and the one Roman Catholic passenger told to run away. Ten of those shot died and only one survived and he has since been to the fore trying to get the Irish Government to submit evidence and information which would help identity and convict the IRA murderers. But the IRA sympathisers in Dublin have stymied these and many other attempts to obtain evidence that would likely lead to the conviction of IRA murderers.
Two Senior RUC men murdered
A further case of the latent sympathies within Irish society for the murderers of Protestants may be seen in the circumstances of the murder of two senior Royal Ulster Constabulary officers, Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan, who were shot dead in 1989 in an ambush by the Provisional IRA’s South Armagh Brigade. The two men were returning from an informal cross-border security conference in Dundalk with senior Garda officers when Superintendent Buchanan’s car, a red Vauxhall Cavalier, was flagged down and fired upon by six IRA gunmen, whom the policemen had taken to be British soldiers.
Superintendent Buchanan was killed outright whilst Chief Superintendent Breen, suffering gunshot wounds, was forced to lie on the ground and shot in the back of the head after he had left the car waving a white handkerchief.
There are grounds for strong suspicions that a member of the Garda informed the IRA of the movements of the two men.
Canadian judge, Peter Cory, investigated the killings in 2003. In his report he said he was unable to find direct evidence of collusion but said ‘on balance of probability’, somebody inside the Dundalk Garda station had passed on information to the IRA regarding the presence of Breen and Buchanan.
He added that he was ‘satisfied there was collusion in the murders.’
Ian Lisles, a retired British Army brigadier who served 14 years in Northern Ireland—much of it in South Armagh—suggested to the Tribunal that the IRA could not have mounted the operation in less than three hours; it most likely had required between five and eight hours of advance preparation. He maintained that the IRA was too professional an organisation to have attempted an ad hoc ambush on such short notice as would have been the case had the attack been carried out upon being alerted by a Garda mole as to the presence of the two senior RUC officers at the Dundalk station.
Consequently, it is anything but surprising that Adams should be awarded €100,000 of British licence fee payers’ money.
Case not Closed
However, the case is not over. “Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him,” Isaiah 3:11. Adams has yet to appear before the “Judge of all the earth”. There is no sympathy of the IRA in His courtroom for, “Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help the evil doers,” Job 8:20.
For years Adams has “sown the wind”! He most certainly “shall reap the whirlwind,” Hosea 8:7.
Let the Dublin travesty of justice serve to turn our minds to that day when for Adams and his ilk, “the reward of his hands shall be given him,” Isaiah 3:10.
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)
31st May 2025