My Articles to the Newspapers

Gerry Adams’ secret fear

I was a student at university in Galway this time twenty years ago when I had the most amazing spiritual experience that any human being could have. While writing an essay as an entry to the UCG Philosophical Society’s competition, I felt the most amazing sense of peace descend on me. I felt an absolute sense of love for all people and an overwhelming sense that I was loved too. I was filled with love.

My essay concerned two babies, whose nametags were switched at birth, and who grew up in families that opposed each other, one a republican and the other a loyalist. These two children ended up murdering their natural fathers in violent incidents during the Troubles. The moral of the story was straightforward, I felt, and in a philosophical sense it meant that all violence was futile and that sectarian violence was simply patricide – or a desire to simply end the human race.

But the feeling of love would not go away after I wrote the essay. I felt that I was in the midst of something really profound and my mind began to search for what that overwhelming significant matter could be. Then it struck me.

It was like lightning struck me. It was to do with the other part of a calculation a friend had shown me in my days at St Columb’s College as a fifteen year old. That calculation worked out the name of Ian Paisley at 666. I had checked the references in the Book of Revelation at that time and I knew that there were to be two beasts.

“Gerry Adams! It has to be!” I roared to myself in the kitchen of the small flat where I had my experience of great love and peace.

I set down the same numeric alphabet, and calculated Gerry Adams’ name at 666. It was the icing on the cake. I now had an equation to back my essay up. My thesis, which in large part was the SDLP thesis, was being validated by God.

I never had any doubt that the SDLP thesis was Christian in orientation, or that the republican campaign of violence was evil in orientation. But now I had the proof. I tried it out on a few people, mainly Sinn Fein members at UCG and they were very interested (and worried). It seemed that I had something on them.

But it only impacted on them. It never impacted on others because others didn’t consider themselves to be doing anything wrong, as opposed to the Sinn Fein members who were assisting the IRA in their campaign of violence. I was left in no doubt that my discovery had gone straight to Gerry Adams.

It wasn’t long before I heard from Sinn Fein. Others may make up excuses but I know that the attack on our home, smashing several windows, in August 1986 was a warning from Sinn Fein. But it was too late. Their war was over. I had taken out their king and all good chess players will know that that is the game over.

Within months of that time, Gerry Adams was sending signals through Fr Alec Reid that he was prepared to end the IRA campaign. My experience had sown the seeds of doubt in Adams’ mind and unnerved him completely. He didn’t want to the Antichrist. More accurately, he didn’t want to go down in history as the man who was regarded as the Antichrist.

In Spring 1987, a year after my experience, the peace process began in earnest with talks between John Hume and Gerry Adams arranged through Fr Alec Reid, and so the history books record a rational explanation of the ending of the IRA campaign.

No-one – especially not republicans – really wants to contemplate the possibility that something got to Gerry Adams to make him decide finally, after months of dithering, to give up the violence.

That something was God. Gerry Adams was confronted with what he had become by God – through me, his instrument – in 1986 and he very quickly developed a yellow streak. They say that Gerry Adams was never all that hot about the war and that has led to all kinds of speculation that he was a top level agent of the British and so on.

But I can end that speculation. Gerry Adams finally came to the conclusion that the war had to end when he realised that history will record him alongside Ian Paisley as the one of the two beasts of Revelation.

God had hit the Republican Movement at its weak point. It was thought that Sinn Fein was impenetrable because of its egalitarian structure which meant that Adams could have been replaced if got to. But the republicans had made a big mistake. They had relied heavily on Adams to fight their case in the public domain so he came to matter more than all the others. God got to Adams and it was checkmate.

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*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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