Adams welcomes end of IRA victims' case, but evidence told its own story

The collapse of the civil case against him means the former Sinn Féin leader did not have to risk facing a verdict

- John Ware

"I attended the case in London out of respect for the claimants," Gerry Adams said after the civil case for damages against him collapsed.

Really?

At Adams’s side was Gerry Kelly, one of the IRA bombers who in 1973 inflicted a lifetime of grievous pain and suffering on John Clark, one of the claimants.

A large piece of metal tore into Clark’s foot when Kelly and others bombed the Old Bailey, killing one man and injuring more than 200.

Adams didn’t claim victory outright, but in welcoming the “emphatic end” of the claim by Clark and two other injured victims of IRA bombings in 1996, he came close.

Sinn Féin has spun the collapse as another defeat for “British establishment” attempts to secure a court judgment that he was the IRA’s warlord during the conflict, something Adams has always vehemently denied. “The case should never have been brought,” he said.

However, Adams didn’t get a judgment on the evidence.

Instead, after all the evidence had been examined, Mr Justice Swift said he wanted to consider a procedural point: whether the claimants had misused the courts by turning their claim that Adams was liable for the three bombings into a proxy for a quasi-public inquiry into his past.