YouSaid · the spoken record

Gerry Adams

lines on the record: 42
first: 2023-05-08
most recent: 2023-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think some do, but I believe Geoffrey, when he says it's not a problem for him. I believe him. He said it's not a problem for me, Michel, being the first minister. So I believe that from him. But it's undoubtedly a problem for some. This state was constructed so that that would never happen.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember actually saying to Mediba what was the story? And he said, we're keeping them. We're certainly going to keep them for a time because we don't want the Afrikaana people to think that we're robbing them of all these symbols. So I can live with that provided there's some parody. We're in a transition. There is change ongoing. And people particularly who have been here maybe 20 years ago coming in will see the changes more readily than those of us who live here. So there's a process of change on their way. I think we're in a phase which needs quiet persuasion. Quiet, gentle, proactive listening to invite those people who may be pro union or who may be a bit dilatory about the future to come over to the notion of why can't we govern ourselves?”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I spent a huge amount of time in Hillsborough Castle when Mo Molin was there. I spent nearly every Sunday and we walked on the grounds and I did the same with David Trimble. David had most of our private conversations up there. And we went right through to Peter Mandelson and I forget there were so many secretaries of state I can't remember their names. So I became quite familiar with it and I supported a lot Moe's efforts to make it a public park which she succeeded in doing. So what's my relationship with it? The first time I went into Dublin Castle I was shocked as a young West Belfast person to see that the old symbols of the empire are still in the Great Hall in Dublin Castle. They're still capped there. And then when I went into South Africa and into the parliament, this was after apartheid had been got rid of. The Afrikaner symbols were still there.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that was one of the great successes. And incidentally, you can still see that this very day that we're talking, because here we are, the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and we've had two American presidents in town, and we've had the American Secretary of State in town, and they still retain that very, very active interest.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mantra of the British government was this is an internal matter for the government of the United Kingdom. Piss off. So they told that to everybody. And President Clinton's intervention then opened up the possibility. And the politics of President Clinton are not that dissimilar from the politics of Tommy Blair and so on and so forth. And then that made it easier because once George Mitchell was put in his special envoy, then you need another special envoy. And then these other countries, the Nordic countries or Canada have all peace mission histories. So I think that was one of our twin nationalizers. And that's something we worked on to some degree plagiarizing the African National Congress's campaign against apartheid was to make it international.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We phoned it in Connolly Host. You just get to the point. Interestingly enough, in Castle buildings, and you'll vouch for this Alistair, everybody presumed that Castle Buildings was bugged. I mean, even Governor Minister. And that's one of the reasons why the British have brought in this shameful bill, because you're still doing the same things in other parts of the world.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. You get to know as you go along. Like our car was bugged. We famously brought a bug back to Leeds Castle to get back to Tony Blair.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always worked on the basis that the spatial branch was set up in Britain against Athenians and one of their tactics was to recruit agents and informers. So you always work on the basis that there are people there who have been tricked, they've been blackmailed, they've been coerced, or they've been paid to work for the British or to work for intelligence services. You work on that. That's the life that you live, you know.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, unless they had personal family connection to conflict, they have no memory. You walk about here, all these young kids, you know, they have no memory, but they're living in a totally conflict-free zone. So that's the great, you know, if you want an achievement and there's lots of achievements, but that's the big singular achievement that those young people. And also that there are people now out there who would otherwise be dead if the conflict had continued.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but neither would they have been able to imagine a Republican like Martin McGuinness being in the same position. So sometimes people can surprise each other in a good way. And it comes back down to the divisions in Ireland are very artificial, as are most divisions between human beings. And it's a bit of a clich ⁇, but a lot of people have much, much more in common that they may think. So Ian at the ripe old age, or whatever age he was, came in and did a decent job and cheered people up and Martin worked with him. And I think, I mean, Martin made a sterling contribution to the whole struggle and to the whole peace process. But in Fernando and Paisley, he did very, very well. And we were talking there understandably about the number of people who have been killed. There have been half a million people born in this statelet since the good”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“two, we noticed across the chamber that he was listening to some of the things that we were saying, that there was a sort of, I'm not saying there was an accord, but there was, you know, you could get a sense of relationships sort of being developed. And that would take me too long to describe all the prombulations to get all of that in place. But he did famously go in with Martin McGuinness.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I have commended David Trimble, who was the first minister from the Unionist position. But it was up and down with David, and it wasn't tenable, and he couldn't get his own party in order. So we decided that we would try and get Ian Paisley into that position. Now, we were in the Northern Assembly with him, so we were across the chamber, and we were moderating our differences in that way. And we advised the two governments, I advised Tony Blair, that we were going to try and do something with the NPT. I took about 18 months, close to two years. The method that we devised was to remove every obstacle he put up so that at the end of it he would have no option but to decide to go in or not. And we thought he would decide to go in because one he wanted to be in that position of power.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, we have been successful politically, but we still haven't got our main objective, which is to end the union with England. And obviously that will be assisted if Sinn P ⁇ in continues to grow in strength. I think there are letters not just for other people in struggle, but for other governments. See, it takes two to tango. So it took, as I said before, the leadership of Tony Blair on the one hand, of Bertie O'Hearn on the other hand, of President Clinton, as well as John Hume and all the folks involved, as well as those of us who were in Republican leadership. And Mark McGuinness has gone to many of these conflict zones and talked to people and we can't preach to them. It's not up to us to dictate what they should do.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think including, let me say this, the deaths of British soldiers or RUC officers. I think all those deaths are to be regretted. It's a regrettable part of our history. And clearly civilians for them to be killed. It doesn't matter whether it was accidental or not. That's even more regrettable. And thankfully we're now out of all of that and we need to learn the lessons of it because what's happening in Palestine now? What's happening in the Sudan? What's happening in Iraq? What's happening in Ukraine? What happened here? It's not that long. I lived 30 years under military occupation. How long were you in the British army?”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe I could take that from the families, but I couldn't take it from a former British soldier. The people in my house weren't combatants. People in my street weren't combatants. Well”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But my thinking and the thinking of others was that we couldn't have a repeat of what happened the first time. It was strategic and it was tactically something. And that also these are our friends. I mean, I talked about being in prison. I was in prison for some of these folks. These are our friends. And it ended up, as you know, famously. I mean, a watershed and Irish political struggle.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we were trying to do what I have described earlier to build a Sinn F ⁇ in party and also to try and develop within Republicanism a peace strategy. So we were trying to do that. And there's a war going on at the same time. And that was incredibly challenging. So, if you like, hand the entire struggle over to prisoners with such high stakes. And then particularly when the first hunger strike ended, and the first hunger strike ended in some contention, where the prisoner in charge was told that there was a deal on its way and he agreed to end the hunger strike and then that was seen as a sign of weakness by the Thatcher regime and a sign of weakness by elements within the business system. And despite valiant efforts by Bobby Sands to make that work, it didn't work.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to get into that type of, going back to what Rory observed, that type of rhetoric. The fact is there was a war. Margaret Thatcher was notorious. Not just for her presiding over the deaths of the hunger strikers, which could have been easily resolved by very simple improvements in the prison regime, but also because she was upfront and she was being the Iron Lady and she was masquerading as somebody who was indamitable and so on and so forth. So there would be very few tears shed for Margaret Thatcher in Republican Ireland or in many villages and wheels or in working class neighbourhoods in Scotland or England itself, you know. But it's done, you know, it's over, it's gone, all of that's in the past”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what they're doing is they're defending their own operatives. There are two issues to this. First of all, there was an agreement, the Stormont House Agreement. The British government were party to that. They've torn it up. They brought in this new bill. It's at the behest of Northern Ireland veterans. It's at the behest of right-wing Tories and others who are from that little Englander mentality. And they have just torn it up because they don't want to see British operative soldiers, police officers going through that process. But every single political party here is against what they're doing. There are elements of the Tory party who are against what they're doing. It's just terrible stuff.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have met many, many, many families of victims of the conflict, including victims of the IRA. And not all victims or not all victims' families respond the same way. Some are the very, very best peacemakers. Very, very best pioneers for peace. Some are still hurt. Some have been fractured and never recovered. I try to deal with all of this in a very respectful way and listen. You've got to listen. And I try to do that. Now, I come from a community. I have two family members were killed. I was shot myself. I'm advised that there's a live death threat against me at this time. My home was bombed twice. So it isn't an academic thing I know what it's like to attend a funeral or to be a wake house. The big thing is that now all of that has ended. So we can't undo it and obviously people have resentments. That's fair enough. That's their right.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he may have, but what did he do about it? John Hume and I came up with what became known as the Hume Adams Agreement. And the Taoiseach of the day, the Irish Prime Minister of the day, Albert Reynolds, gave that to John Major. And the Downey Street Declaration arose out of that. But the Downey Street Declaration, and both John and I made this point, didn't go far enough. It didn't deal with the core because what we needed was all of these equality guarantees and human rights protections, but we also needed the constitutional issue resolved back to this business about an alternative. So now there is an alternative. Now, if the people here want They can vote to leave.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me leave it easy. One, if I can use that term first. Tony Blair made a difference. I would grievously disagree with his adventures in Iraq and other foreign affairs issues. But on this issue, he made a huge difference in Alistair and Jonathan and the team that were in at that time made a difference. So he deserves great credit. John Major was handed a peace process on a plate and didn't accept it. Now, arguably, he was a minority government. He was dependent on Union support and so on. But there's this thing, and I hope this doesn't sound racist, this thing which I describe every so often as the English disease, which when it comes to Ireland, these senior people are just totally oblivious of the needs, the rights, the demands, the aspirations of Ireland.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That term was actually talking to Republicans through a back channel while she was making arrogant denunciations and saying she would never talk to Republicans. That happened during the first hunger strike. It happened during the second hunger strike.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work of a lot of very, very good people. So Terrence O'Neill, of course, he has responsibility and he may have done his best in his own way. But the London Parliament is, by its own claim, the sovereign parliament. So how could London preside over a situation where a section of people within the British state was being treated on the basis that people were being treated?”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first time I was arrested was for selling a newspaper. The newspaper was banned and as part of the public defiance of the Special Powers Act we decided to take an initiative and go out in public and sell the newspaper. The Sinn F ⁇ in organization rebranded itself as Republican clubs and held a meeting. And the Republican clubs were banned the next day. So at a human level I can have some sympathy with Terrence O'Neill but what they've been asked to do was simple, reasonable and modest. And the government in London was complicit in all of this. You see, I don't think you can understand anything about Irish affairs unless you see it in the context of English involvement in Irish affairs. So this state is a partitioned and those days it was an apartheid state. That has changed as a result.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to answer that with the benefit of all the time. I was involved in housing agitation and we had formed a housing action group in West Belfast because people were being held and were being housed in dreadful conditions and there weren't enough and a lot of.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was only a kid, but I remember meeting with his children in Australia. They moved to Australia. I remember meeting them subsequently. And they said that he was always bitterly disappointed that he hadn't done more.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I come out of prison, a group of us started to try and reboot Sinn F ⁇ in. Now Sinn F ⁇ in was an honorable organization and did lots of good work, but it wasn't a political organization in the sense that we now see it. And it's very hard to organize politically when you're underground. It's very hard when you're Sinn Fiam was banned at the time. So it's very hard to do the type of open political work that you would be used to Alistair. If you're of a meeting like this would be rated in the old days we would have all ended up in a long cache because this would be an illegal assembly. So that was happening. So you had the efforts to try and get a peace process, the efforts to try and build Sinn F ⁇ in as a relevant radical political party and the ongoing war.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we weren't operated in any dual strategy. The fact is there was a war going on and it was being conducted by the different protagonists, the British forces, their surrogates within loyalism and then the Irish Republican army.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You gotta listen. I'd have that arises all sorts of other little things. You can't decide who you're going to talk to. If you're going to talk to Sinn F ⁇ in, you can't decide that Martin McGuinness can't be in the delegation. If you're going to talk to the DUP, you can't decide to the NPASLY can't be in there. So there's all sorts of little, very good bullet points that would enforce or reinforce any negotiating position. So what was the essence of his position? Treat people with respect, talk to people, find a way forward and look for an alternative. And he was just central to that. And he was also tenacious.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, following Alex Treed was a redemptorist priest, and he and Father Des Wilson lived in West Belfast, so they knew what was going on in the neighborhoods, and they knew all of the aggression. And the whole line from the British and from the Irish governments was this was criminality, this was gangsterism. We have to smash it. We have to subdue it and so on. So he and I were talking, and there was a huge amount of condemnation of the IRA from the Irish government, from the Catholic Church hierarchy and so on. And if these folks want the IRA to stop, why don't they come up with an alternative? So he went away and he tried to get an alternative. And in the course of that, he developed some principles which I think are fundamental to any peace process. You've got to talk.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing that I wrote on this was in 1976 from Long Cash, and it was around the time of the peace people here in Ireland and the peace people was formed when the British Army shot the driver of an IRA getaway car, shot him dead and the car careered out of control and ploughed into a family who were out walking and children, the McGuire children, were killed. So the peace women and that entire sort of phenomenon arose out of that awful incident. I then reflected on that in a little pamphlet which I wrote and it started to probe about what is patient, how do you get past and so on. So that was 1976.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a Ulways dull. Nobody ever would right with me. I'm no use. But you're pretty. With your words Well, from what it's worth, you know, and I make as many mistakes as anybody that talks as often as I have to talk. I tried to know you're talking to too many, you're talking to so many audiences, so here I'm talking to people, I presume, in Britain, so I'm trying to give an outline. But anyway, the point I'm making is you have to be, and I want to stress I make as many mistakes as anybody, but we're trying to do here is unprecedented, right? We have, by dint of the Good Friday Agreement, a peaceful way to end the union with England. So to do that, we have to persuade people who are for the Union with England to vote for United Ireland. So we all the time have to be trying to make sure that we don't defend them or that we are”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly there was within the prisons both women prisoners and Arma prison and within the prison I was in, there was a prison community and most famously that was expressed in the hunger strikes of 1981 where 10 men died in hunger strike. There were hundreds of men imprisoned. So their surety was a bond. And most of it is reflecting back on it apart from the hunger strikes will reflect back on the funny things that happened and the crack.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I served four and a half years in jail. I was in the prison ship made stone we had a prison ship in Belfast Harbour. Sat and sewage from the trains and we were capped below decks. That was in 1972. I was then shipped up to Long Cache, kept there for a while, released then to take part in those talks, put back again, was in Belpass prison at least twice, was in the H blocks of Long Cache for a very short period and spent most of my time in the cages of Long Cache. Interestingly enough, The Supreme Court in London found that my imprisonment was unlawful just last year, that I was unlawfully detained.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because there would be town lies, and you know, we can't be telling lies about these matters. And what was your question? I'd be doing it all this time.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Martin McGuinness, and Martin McGuinness and I both twigged at the same time as we were getting off the bus. He said, we were here 40 years ago.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A year later, I mean, we've learned enough of that since. And just interestingly enough, 40 years later, for some reason, we were all in Downing Street and it lasted longer than was intended. We all missed our flights and they got them with the range for us to be flown back in a private plane. And there we were. And exactly the same airport. It was a military airport.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“whereby those talks would take place. So there was a wee bit of sensible work being done. But it fell apart in weeks. I don't even know how long it lasted.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was one of the delegation. Martin McGinnis was, we were the two younger just by coincidence, the two youngest members of the delegation. I was 23. He was 22. On reflection, I think was brave. This place was up in flames. If it wasn't that long after Bloody Sunday, the British pirate regiments had shot all those people in Derry. And the storm Parliament was parogued. It was a unionist dominated regime. Confirmed to Willie Whiteboard what he tried to do was brave. Now, it didn't last very long. The discussions were fair enough. I had actually been involved. I had been interned without trial. And I had been released and myself and another Republican called Dahio Connell had negotiated out arrangements.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course we did, but you can only move so far and unfurnish to you and to Jonathan and to Tony. It was only when you came in with that big majority and the new government and new kids in the block that you turned things the way they were turned.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was only because we persuaded you and your government to embrace peace. And when Mr Blair changed British government policy to actually talk on the Sinn F ⁇ in, imagine, I just imagine that the British government wouldn't talk to a person who had a mandate as an MP leading a political party which had a declared publicised peace objective.”
2023-05-08 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 17: Gerry Adams: The Troubles, Margaret Thatcher, and the IRA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source