The two-hour documentary features almost exclusively the testimony of the one-time West Belfast MP
A new film about Gerry Adams reveals how the former Sinn Fein president admits he often “has doubts” and “regrets” about the struggle and the IRA’s campaign of violence during the Troubles.
The republican leader, who has always denied he was a member of the IRA, also revealed hunger striker Bobby Sands never wanted to die and how he has never fully come to terms with his death and those of the others who died.
Mr Adams also disclosed that in his first brush with sectarianism was mistaken for a Protestant and had to recite the Hail Mary to prove he was a Catholic.
The two-hour documentary, Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man, directed by Trisha Ziff, features almost exclusively the testimony of the one-time West Belfast MP and Louth TD. What stands out in his reflections is a lack of bitterness and a palpable relief his 60 years of activism has finally led to a lasting peace.
The interviews were conducted over a five-year period and are supported by a wealth of archive footage and photographs which, if nothing else, are a stark reminder of the terrible times the people of the North lived through.
At the opening of the documentary he says he harks back to the days in Ballymurphy in West Belfast before adding that he hopes he doesn’t paint a “rosy picture” of what was one of the darkest chapters in modern Irish history.
He proudly proclaims: “One of the best periods of my activism was in ’69 and ’70 when the entire community of the Ballymurphy area rose up and defeated the British Army with stones and bottles and bin lids.”
The family of Jean McConville -kidnapped and murdered by the IRA – and those who lost loved ones in the Provisional’s bombing campaign, will no doubt believe his thick-lensed spectacles are also rose tinted.
The 76-year-old republican leader admits he often has doubts about “the struggle”… “you wouldn’t be a thinking person at all, if you didn’t have doubts and didn’t have regrets”.
But he is quick to mention that he still has a “sense of outrage that this country of Ireland is divided and partitioned… that an English government deems that it has some right to control our affairs”.
He explained his first brush with sectarianism was when he was accosted by two Catholics who mistook him for a Protestant.
Adams said: “They asked me to recite the Hail Mary or some such prayer”, highlighting the absurdity that could lead to instant death at the time. In most of the interviews the former Louth TD sits relaxed in his armchair and is none more so when he talks about how he met his wife Collette in 1970 the birth of his son, Gearoid three years later.
He describes Ballymurphy at the time of the infamous massacre and how the Parachute Regiment murdered innocent civilians in preparation for Bloody Sunday in Derry.
Adams said: “The people of Ballymurphy never went to war… the war came to us.
“There were 600 people from the greater Ballymurphy area imprisoned. Eleven died over the period of the Ballymurphy Massacre. Ten were shot dead; one died after being accosted by British Paratroopers.”
He becomes clearly emotional when speaking about the hunger strikes which claimed the lives of ten republican prisoners in Long Kesh in 1981.
He adds: “There’s something about the hunger strikes which I’ve never been able to properly come to terms with, people of my generation, particularly those of us who were very, very close to the prisoners, [it’s] very emotional.”
But he said Bobby Sands, and the nine others who died, died for what they believed in. He said: “Bobby didn’t want to die on hunger strike.
“If you read his letters, his poetry, the columns he wrote to his mother… but he knew that unless [Margaret] Thatcher was prepared to meet the prisoners half way even on dealing with these issues, that he was going to die on hunger strike.”
