Gerry Adams denies ever being in the IRA. History suggests otherwise

Following the former Sinn Féin president's libel victory against the BBC, the reporter John Ware reflects on a 40-year campaign to rewrite a troubled past

- John Ware

Gerry Adams stared at me; an intense, piercing stare across his desk on the top floor of Connolly House, the Belfast hub for Sinn Féin, notorious for more than a few IRA interrogations.

It was autumn 1991. That summer had seen hopes for a political settlement in Northern Ireland flicker, then die. The Northern Ireland secretary Peter Brooke was trying to revive them.

For BBC Panorama I had sought an interview with Adams. Like several other journalists my relationship with Adams had been pretty fractious over the previous decade. On my arrival at Connolly House, I was summoned upstairs to his office. It was like being back in the headmaster's study.

"Before we do this interview - if I do it - you need to tell me who told you all this rubbish about me in your last programme."

That "rubbish" was the chronology of Adams's IRA career set out in a 1983 documentary I produced for ITV's World in Action called "The Honourable Member for Belfast West". It charted his meteoric rise from humble volunteer to the "shogun" or supremo of the "Republican movement" as the IRA euphemistically called it.

Adams was at his denials again last month, this time in the witness box of the Dublin high court in a libel case he brought against the BBC. The case concerned a specific allegation in a 2016 documentary that he had authorised the execution of an MI5 informer 10 years earlier. The jury found that the BBC had not acted in good faith or in a fair and reasonable way and awarded Gerry Adams £84,000 in damages.