Revealed: The full chilling story of how Gerry Adams lied to protect his paedophile brother - and helped him work with children
24th December 2009
When night came, the terror started. Across Belfast, terrorist punishment squads scoured the streets for petty criminals.
Screams and gunshots rang out after dark as summary justice was handed out. For so-called anti-social elements caught by these gangs, the punishments were lingering - and gruesome. No mercy was shown.
Bundling the victim into a waiting car, the terrorists would take the suspect to a favourite secluded spot - a cemetery where IRA volunteers had been buried with full military honours as a salvo of bullets were fired into the air.
There, in the dead of night, sentence would be pronounced, depending on the severity of the crime.
A car thief might escape with a severe beating with baseball bats for a first offence. But regular offenders faced knee-capping. The victim was ordered to remove their trousers (to prevent infection from fibres forced into their flesh by a bullet) and shot in the back of the leg. Crippled for life, this served as a permanent warning to them and others.
Drug dealers received a double knee-capping, while those seized by the Nutting Squad - a gang of sophisticated IRA killers who tortured suspected informers with power drills - rarely lived to tell the tale.
Such brutal justice was commonplace - and sanctioned by the IRA leadership. At the height of the Troubles, a knee-capping was being carried out every night in Belfast, with more than 6,000 crippled.
But by far the most grisly punishments were reserved for 'nonces' - sex offenders and child molesters, regarded as the lowest of the low.
Indeed, the punishment squads were often superfluous to requirement, because gangs of locals would take the law into their own hands.
In one case, a man was locked in a van with three savage dogs and torn to pieces. In another, a rapist was crucified by being nailed to a fence beside a busy road. Homes of suspected nonces were petrol-bombed by mobs.
Yet the occupant of one terrace house remained unmolested, even though many people - police, social workers, politicians and locals - had heard dreadful gossip about what happened behind his front door.
There was a simple reason this man was not attacked: a huge poster of Gerry Adams, the public face of the IRA, hung from his front window.
And to make sure there was no confusion, the man would greet callers by asking: 'Do you know who my brother is?'
For the occupant was Liam Adams, little brother of Gerry, kingpin of the organisation and a man who reached worldwide prominence when Margaret Thatcher ordered that his voice could not be broadcast in order to prevent the IRA benefiting from the 'oxygen of publicity'.
Liam's warning sign worked. It made clear he was an IRA ' untouchable' on account of his family connections.
Picture: Gerry Adams (Senior) IRA terrorist aristocrat with hallowed son Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein leader) in Ireland. Terrorist aristocrats and Child abusers in their own family
Due to the prominence of Gerry and his father, Gerry senior, also a stalwart of the IRA, the Adams family was regarded as 'terrorist aristocracy' in Belfast.
Such power meant that for more than three decades, Liam managed to escape retribution for the rape and sexual abuse of his daughter Aine, which began in the Seventies when she was just four and ended when she was ten.
This week, Liam finally handed himself into the police to face sex abuse charges - 22 years after Aine first told 'Uncle Gerry' of the abuse.
Why did Liam hand himself in? Only because his brother Gerry told him to do so after Aine went public with the abuse allegations for the first time in a TV interview.
The truth is that Gerry Adams has spent the past two decades protecting his brother by covering up for his unspeakable crimes and persuading his niece to keep quiet about it - to 'keep it in the family' - in order to protect his own skin.
Yesterday,
appalled rape campaigners said Adams could have ended his niece's quest for justice years ago had he spoken out earlier.
Picture: Aine Adams, niece of Gerry Adams (Daughter of Liam Adams).Sexually Abused by own father from age of 7 to 10 years
Yet he chose not to, for the sake of his political career.
The disgust felt at Adams's behaviour is palpable in Ireland, a country reeling from the scandal of paedophile priests.
The brutal facts, according to Aine, are as follows. From 1978, her father Liam used to beat up her mother Sally badly enough to make her run from the house - leaving him free to abuse Aine who, like most victims of paedophiles, told no one. Sally eventually threw out Liam in 1983 and divorced him.
It was only when Aine discovered her father had a new wife with another little girl to abuse that she told her mother, who went to the police.
Aine was examined by police doctors, who confirmed she had been abused, but she says officers were more interested in recruiting members of the Adams family to act as informers than in helping her.
She turned to Uncle Gerry for help, hoping he would punish her father for his unspeakable crimes.
Instead, he tried to convince his niece it was her father who was the victim rather than her.
Adams told Aine: 'Our Liam can't cope with life and I'm trying to get him to meet you, but you know he is a coward and might not want to do that.'
Under pressure from some un-named Republicans, Aine withdrew her police complaint and tried to get on with her life. She had two children - but couldn't sleep with the light off or the door closed.
By 2007, Aine was so fed up of being strung along by her uncle that she revived the police investigation. A warrant was issued for Liam's arrest in November 2008.
Facing 23 specimen charges of rape and sexual assault, Liam went on the run. Aine finally spoke out last week because of the lack of any progress concerning his arrest.
So compromised was Gerry Adams by her TV interview that he made a public appeal for Liam to come forward.
But even though Liam voluntarily walked into a police station in Co. Sligo on Monday, he was allowed to walk free because of a legal loophole that meant the arrest warrant - issued in Northern Ireland - was not valid south of the Border.
Picture: Smiling Paedophile who abused his own Daughter Sexually
It is understood Liam told Gardai, the Irish police, he had been living in Northern Ireland, but had crossed the Border to surrender himself.
As for Gerry, a pathological liar who denies to this day he has ever been a member of the IRA, he has claimed he did everything possible to try to help the child victim in the affair. Yet it was his brother he treated as a victim, rather than his niece.
After Liam's divorce, Gerry backed his brother's decision to make a new start in life. He supported his new career working in youth clubs, where he would have easy, regular access to young girls and boys.
Liam was appointed a youth worker at Clonard monastery in West Belfast, where Gerry attended Mass and was close friends with many of the priests, some of whom he would invite to his home nearby.
As the scandal erupted this week, the Sinn Fein leader said he had warned the priests about Liam's unsavoury past - a claim angrily denied by officials and clergy at the monastery.
'We have no record of Gerry Adams giving us any of this type of information,' says a monastery official.
'There is no record whatsoever regarding concerns about Mr Liam Adams during his time of employment at Clonard Youth Centre.'
Last night, Adams had again changed his story, claiming he was appalled to learn that his brother had been working with children - and that 'if I had been aware, I would have tried to stop it'.
He also claims he was 'estranged' from Liam for 20 years after Aine told him of the sex abuse and that they rarely met or spoke.
This, too, is a lie. Gerry Adams was pictured at Liam's second wedding in 1994, smiling happily, during the two decades they were allegedly estranged.
Alongside the brothers was Joe Cahill, a senior Republican, who wore a green ribbon in support of IRA prisoners.
Gerry Adams also paid official visits to youth projects where his brother worked, guaranteeing Liam publicity to help his political ambitions and the potential to raise funds in the community.
While a youth development worker at one project, Liam Adams hosted a visit by their local MP - one Gerry Adams - who unveiled a mural and talked about the pressures that can lead to young people committing suicide.
Adams also refused to intervene when Liam announced he planned to help vulnerable Romanian orphans. And so he was able to travel to Romania and invite groups of children back to Belfast - with minimal supervision.
Liam coveted publicity. Despite being a secret paedophile and child rapist, in 1996 he garnered favourable headlines by threatening to expose a ring of wealthy perverts he claimed were abusing children.
'We have the names of several business people, who we are 100 per cent sure are involved,' Liam said.
'The authorities should be doing more to investigate, using the evidence that has come to light.'
But then Gerry helped his little brother from the moment he heard of the abuse from Aine. Indeed, he tried to help him carve out a political career of his own.
While the pair were 'estranged', Gerry reportedly even helped arrange for Liam to become a Sinn Fein candidate in Dundalk - only for local officials to rebel at an 'outsider' from Belfast being imposed on them by Adams and the leadership.
In a cynical bid for sympathy, Gerry Adams claimed this week that his family had also been the victims of sexual and physical abuse by his father Gerry senior, who was buried with full military honours in Belfast six years ago.
Adams says he discovered the news about his own father - a thug known as 'Monkey' on account of his simian features - while trying to 'sort out' the business with Aine.
He refused to say whether Liam Adams was abused.
Had the paedophile scandal emerged at the height of the Troubles, commentators believe Adams would have been thrown out of the IRA.
Yet his position as an MP is now under threat amid a welter of new allegations exposing him as a liar.
In a damning new book to be published about the secret life of Gerry Adams, there will be revelations about his role in the case of The Disappeared - an infamous case involving the IRA murder of a dozen civilians.
This will finally nail the lie of Adams's denial of his involvement with the IRA, not to mention revealing the existence of secret tapes about his involvement in the killing of Jean McConville, a mother of ten suspected of being an informer.
With his brother facing arrest and his niece pouring scorn on him, the past is at last coming back to haunt Adams.
The question is now whether his lies and special pleading will be enough to save him from political destruction.
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