If the defining image of the first day of Gerry Adams’s court case was him in a bulletproof vest, the second day’s image was him in an Aran woolly geansaí.
Rarely, if ever, has RTÉ’s Reeling in the Years been played in the king’s bench division of the high court in London. But there it was on-screen in the court in the civil suit brought against the former Sinn Féin president by Troubles-era victims of IRA bombings.
Lawyers for the claimants – three men injured in various IRA attacks in Britain – broadcast a clip from Reeling in the Years 1986. It showed a then 37-year-old jumper-wearing Adams and Martin McGuinness shepherding an alleged IRA member, Evelyn Glenholme, through a crowd on Henry Street in Dublin as she was chased by gardaí.
A detective is seen firing in the air, before the programme’s 1986 soundtrack kicks in with Wham’s upbeat track The Edge of Heaven. “We’ve heard enough,” said the claimants’ barrister Anne Studd KC, who played the footage while making her case that alleges the former republican leader was a leading IRA member.
Adams (77), his hair and beard now as white as it was black in the vintage footage, appeared to shrug with bemusement in the courtroom as the RTÉ clip ended.
The excerpt was played during the evidence of Shane Paul O’Doherty, a former IRA man called by lawyers for the plaintiffs – John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock. The three men were injured in the Old Bailey bombing of 1973 and the London docklands and Manchester attacks of 1996, respectively.
Barry Laycock. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire
They hold Adams personally responsible and are suing him for personal injury, seeking £1 damages. He denies their claims, including the allegation that he was in the IRA or sat on the army council. His lawyers say the case is a “fallacy” based on “hearsay”.
O’Doherty begged to differ during his evidence. He was asked by Studd to comment on a 1970s photograph of the former Sinn Féin leader wearing a beret at an IRA funeral. O’Doherty said it showed Adams as an IRA member.
Studd asked if a non-IRA member would have worn such a beret. “Not a chance in those years,” he replied. He said the wearing the beret favoured by IRA members would have attracted the attention of the authorities.
Adams, chin on his hand, watched intently as O’Doherty spoke. His cross-examination by Adams’s legal team is due to end on Wednesday morning. Before proceedings had ended on Tuesday, one of Adams’s barristers, James Robottom, had focused on whether O’Doherty had really been an important member of the IRA in the 1970s.
Earlier on Tuesday, the court heard from two of the IRA victims and plaintiffs suing Adams, Ganesh and Laycock. Clark, a police officer during the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, is too frail to appear. DUP MPs Gavin Robinson and Gregory Campbell were among those watching in the court.
Ganesh was badly injured in the 1996 docklands bombing, which killed his close friends. He testified that he was in “a dark place” after the attack. He developed mental health difficulties. He said he got “paranoid delusions” that the IRA was after him. Ganesh became an alcoholic to cope.
Jonathan Ganesh. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
Robottom asked why he had not sued Adams before now – a central plank of the republican’s defence is that the claim is time-barred. Ganesh said he wasn’t in a fit state to do it in the years after the attack: “It was the last thing on my mind.”
Laycock, a railway worker who narrowly escaped death in the Arndale attack, said he had pursued the case against Adams to “get justice” for IRA victims.
He, too, described the devastating impact the IRA bombing had on his life. He said his family, including his daughters who are nurses, helped him get through it.
After the hearing, Laycock emerged to greet the media outside the London court complex. Adams hovered in the background, waiting for his turn to speak into the microphones. The Sinn Féin leader will get his chance to speak in court next Monday.
The case continues on Wednesday with evidence from two witnesses granted anonymity by the court.