‍The King and Queen outside the Duke of York pub in Belfast

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‍LAST week I wrote about Philip Geddes, the brilliant young Hickey reporter killed by the IRA in the 1983 Harrods bomb. Well, today I turn my attention to the man I knew almost as long as I did Philip and who I believe may have been responsible for his murder.

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‍Like Geddes, he was a bright grammar schoolboy but left after his ‘O’ Levels to become a terrorist. He will deny that, as he has for more than 50 years, and just as he is currently doing in the High Court (arriving in a bullet-proof vest).

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‍I speak of course of Gerry Adams, former leader of Sinn Fein, MLA for West Belfast in the Stormont parliament and TD for Louth in Dublin’s Dail. And I believe head of the Provisionals’ West Belfast brigade and according to most of the army, police and Intelligence services then and since, the leading strategist of the organisation together with Martin McGuinness. If I am mistaken, I invite him to sue me, or at least Lord Drone who has bottomless funds to support fearless journalism.

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‍I met Wee Gerry, so called because he was four months short of 16 and serving pints in the Duke of York, Belfast in June 1964. It was my first day as the greenest ingénue cub reporter on the News Letter, the world’s oldest continuously published daily and one of Belfast’s three dailies, all still going strong. The Dukes, as it was known, was owned by the formidable Mrs Keaveny and her son Jimmy. It was a proper pub, always busy despite the proliferation of local competition, with decent food made by Jimmy’s sister. Today it is better than ever as is the picturesque Commercial Court which has housed the Dukes for 200 years.

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‍The pub was frequented by journalists from the News Letter and the Belfast Telegraph and by lawyers settling their differences after a day in the nearby law courts. Among them were several Stormont MPs, mostly Unionists, not to mention occasional visits by my friend Ann O’Neill, slightly wayward daughter of Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s prime minister at the time. A great place for a spot of ear-wigging by Wee Gerry you might think, though I’m not convinced that ever happened.

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‍When the Keavenys sold up in 1972 and Gerry was busy carrying coffins of dead Provisionals, the pub was blown up. It turned out it wasn’t the target, that was the Belfast High Court but a car carrying the bomb had been abandoned when the army took too strong an interest in it. It was rebuilt and extended but is still the Dukes as I remember it. And when the King and Queen visited it last year, I wonder if anyone told them of its former barman?

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‍It was in the same year that I finally realised that Wee Gerry was indeed Gerry Adams; by then he had grown the beard and was always shown with dark glasses and a black beret and as often as not with the coffin as a grim fashion accessory. I was then on David English’s Daily Mail and living safely in the leafy environs of my home high up on the North Downs. But all my family were still in the province and I visited regularly and knew just what life was like at height of the so-called Troubles. As did any reporter who covered the place.

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‍The fact that Adams wore a black beret at funerals is a mark of his IRA membership; I am assured that non-members did so at their peril. Former IR ‘volunteers’ have testified over the years that he was a leading Provisional, taking over as chief of staff in 1977 following the arrest of Seamus Twomey. He was in and out of the Maze, once leading an escape of IRA prisoners. He was the subject of several assassination attempts, one almost successful when he was hit by three bullets fired by a UDA gunman in 1984.

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‍In fact, I can reveal that on another occasion the Army came to his rescue though to this day he may not know it. A good friend, a retired general, told me a few years ago that when he was serving as a colonel in Ulster, he had intelligence that a car Adams was about to get into had been wired with explosives by the UDA. My chum decided that his death would lead to untold follow-up savagery and so arranged for a staged car crash forcing a traffic diversion. Adams and his group had no option than to leg it to a safe house and secure another car. Meanwhile the Army disarmed the explosives with a controlled explosion.

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‍Adams is highly intelligent and a prolific writer of both prose and poetry with 15 books to his name. He joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967 which, had I still been in Belfast, I hope I would have done. Northern Ireland at that time was unrecognisable from the open, multi-cultural place it is today and that is due in large part to the start given by the civil rights movement, consisting mostly of students from Queen’s. There was a lot to be angry about then, especially if you were a Roman Catholic.

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‍If Adams wasn’t a leading Provisional why was he released from internment in 1972 to take part in secret talks with Willie Whitelaw in Cheyne Walk (a long way from Ballymurphy) which led to a short-lived truce?

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‍Thatcher made him famous by banning his voice from being heard on the airwaves of the UK, quite the most ridiculous thing she ever did (apart from the poll tax and and and...). So why doesn’t he fess up to membership of the Provisionals? McGuinness never hid his and when he died in 2017 he was lauded as a peacemaker and statesman. Rightly so in my view.

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‍Sadly Wee Gerry will never have the same respect from all sides, in particular from Baroness Paisley, widow of Ian. When the old firebrand died in 2014, McGuinness rang or visited her every week to see how she was. Sadly, the friendly young barman I remember so well, will instead always be seen as threatening and darkly sinister.

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‍And we can never be sure that he didn’t give the go-ahead for the bomb that killed 24-year-old Philip Geddes.

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‍*****

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‍Keir Starmer clearly has a talent for getting things wrong, not a good trait when you are prime minister. The list seems endless: winter fuel allowance, employers’ national insurance, inheritance tax for farmers, most notably the odious Peter Scandelson...we all know the charge sheet. But one decision he got exactly right was not to join Trump and Netanyahu in starting what increasingly looks like the prelude to a war which may soon engulf the world.

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‍He was mercilessly criticised by Trump, Badenoch, of course Farage, and predictably by the Mail, Telegraph, and the slavish Express which seems to have abandoned afternoon news conference for a 5pm instruction memo from Tory Party HQ. How stupid they all look now, desperately rowing back, in the case of Badenoch claiming she had never advocated joining Israel and the US offensively.

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‍For once Starmer was spot on: this is an illegal war which was never ratified by Congress or the UN and we all know what happened when Blair jumped to Bush’s orders. More than 70 per cent of British voters do not support the war on Iran and in the States opposition grows by the day. Nobody knows its purpose, how and when it will end (if it does) and how hard it will hit domestic prices which seems far more important than the issue of morality.

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‍This is a war started by two criminals, Trump (a total of 86 charges against him ranging from sexual assault to racketeering) and Netanyahu (corruption) against a regime built on authoritarianism, sexism and murder. In other words, there isn’t a good guy in it. And now, right on cue, enters Putin who has been providing intelligence support for Iran. The result? Trump has eased sanctions on Russia.

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‍I’m not sorry that the war has shone a spotlight on that overheated hell-hole Dubai where UAE authorities are showing their true colours and charging anybody who posts pictures of damage caused by Iranian missiles. This has resulted in these ridiculous so-called ‘influencers’ rushing to tell their dumb followers how great Dubai is, as bigly a lie as even Trump has told.

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‍The outlook is grim because nobody, and certainly not the men who started it, knows where this will go.

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‍Whoever thought the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would arrive in a golf cart?

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‍*****

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‍AND FINALLY

‍It’s St Patrick’s Day and it has got off to a great start with Jessie Buckley awarded Best Actress Oscar. How much better it might have been if England had rightly beaten France by avoiding so many penalties in the all-time great game in Paris. And it would have helped if the ref had better eyesight. That way we would have been Six Nations champions.

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‍Never has so many Irish been rooting for England. Today they are celebrating Patrick who was in fact a Welshman. Ain’t life confusing?

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‍ALAN FRAME

‍17 March 2026