For decades, Adams has been identified in every credible history of the Irish republican movement as a Provisional IRA commander since at least 1972, when British authorities freed him from prison to participate in the Provisionals’ first face-to-face truce talks with U.K. government ministers in London.
The Irish government, citing its own security services, says Adams stepped down from the IRA’s ruling “army council” only in 2005 when the group formally renounced violence and disarmed.
Yet Adams has insisted he was never in the IRA — a position repeated at the end of each episode of Disney’s recent acclaimed series “Say Nothing” that depicted Adams as, indeed, a key IRA figure involved in orchestrating Belfast bloodshed from the early 1970s onward.
That TV show was based on a book about the IRA’s 1972 abduction, execution and secret burial of a Belfast mother of 10. Adams was arrested in 2014 over claims he oversaw the IRA unit responsible but was released without charge.
Since then, Adams has successfully sued the British government to quash the only criminal convictions in his record — for trying to escape from prison in 1973 and 1974 while being interned without trial as an IRA suspect.
This time, after a three-week trial, the 11-member jury ruled that the BBC’s Spotlight program and a follow-up online article had damaged Adams’ reputation by contending that he had sanctioned Donaldson’s killing. Jurors rejected the BBC’s defense that reporting the allegations against Adams was “fair, reasonable and in the public interest.”
