Before The Dawn by Gerry Adams

My rather archaic website is due to bite the dust sometime this year, so I have decided to post all my book, music, film and theatre reviews, plus occasional essays and features, on this blog, as a kind of repository of my arts journalism over the years (which is what the website’s main function really was, up until now). I will endeavour to post one a day, which should keep me going for a while. To make things easier for myself, they will appear in alphabetical order, within each grouping (books, films, etc.). Enjoy the lucky dip.

To start, curiously enough, my take on Gerry Adam’s autobiography Before The Dawn, from 1997. Commissioned by the San Francisco Chronicle, I do not know if they ever used it. An updated version of the book was published in 2018, I notice. 

Before The Dawn (An Autobiography)

By Gerry Adams

(William Morrow; 325 pages; $25 Hardcover; Published February 10th, 1997)

When contemplating or confronted with what is politely but euphemistically referred to as ‘The Troubles’ in the North, most soft Southerners, myself included, are inclined to throw up our hands wearily and declare, ‘A plague on both your houses’. Although the border is only fifty miles from Dublin, for many in the South the North may as well be a thousand miles away, so different are people’s experiences and living conditions. One of the most interesting things to emerge from and be reinforced by this autobiography by Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, is how Northern Ireland has evolved into virtually a country apart, isolated from, and suspicious of, both the Republic of Ireland and Britain. Unionists want to maintain the link with Britain, chiefly for economic reasons, while it is an open secret that if the British could get rid of the North tomorrow morning, they would. This relationship is further compounded at present because John Major’s Conservative Party is dependent on a small Unionist vote to keep it in power in the Westminster parliament in London. Republicans claim to aspire to a United Ireland, yet regard the South as a partitionist state and, as Adams writes, ‘The absentionist refusal to recognise the right of the British parliament to rule in the northeastern six counties and the refusal also to recognize the legitimacy of the Leinster House parliament in Dublin were cornerstones of republican belief.’ So while both Loyalists and Nationalists claim to be sponsored by states outside their own jurisdiction, (Britain and Ireland respectively), the relationship they have with those states is uneasy at the best of times, and fraught with ambivalence and mistrust.

So to the book in question, and what light it sheds on these considerations. It begins with an account of Adams’ formative years, the influence on him of his family’s strongly Republican background and the poverty of his childhood, and is written in a homely, anecdotal style, with lots of dialogue, so that it sometimes reads like fiction rather than autobiography. The tweeness of his account of his first confession is such that one would scarcely think it came from the pen of the leader of an organisation which tacitly condones violent means to achieve its objectives. However, as we progress through his treatment of the Civil Rights movement, Bloody Sunday, and his time in Long Kesh internment camp, the writing gets a little more meaty, and it is impossible not to be moved and to sympathise when he recounts the stories of the British army wrecking his family home, and of the hunger strikes and negotiations with British government representatives of 1980-81.

The book does beg several important questions though, like why did he join Sinn Fein instead of the IRA in the first place, and how closely entwined are these organisations? Although the epilogue provides a brief summary of events to date, the narrative effectively ends in 1981, which is disappointing for those of us interested in current developments. Adams’ ostracism by Bill Clinton and John Hume, among others, since the Canary Wharf bombing and the breakdown of the peace process in February 1996, is not addressed. There’ll be no more visas courtesy of Clinton and tea on the White House lawn in the foreseeable future, and Hume wrote recently in an article in The Irish Times, ‘To make an electoral pact with Sinn Fein without an IRA ceasefire would be the equivalent of asking our voters to support the killing of innocent human beings by the IRA.’ For this has always been one of the most unsavoury aspects of the Republican movement in the North: its classic guerrilla war tactic of having a ‘political wing’ (Sinn Fein) and a ‘military wing’ (the IRA), a good cop and a bad cop, and one of the reasons Sinn Fein is not taken seriously in democratic politics, and the IRA is condemned in civilised society. (Funny to reflect on that much used and abused term, ‘Republican’: in France in 1789 it meant someone who favoured democracy over monarchy; in America it means a right wing conservative; in Ireland it means someone who plants bombs and shoots people.) Of course, the Unionists are no better, with their political parties and their paramilitary organisations.              

Denis Donaghue, the literary critic and professor, has written that the North is not a ‘problem’, but a ‘situation’. It will eventually solve itself over time, if only by simple demographics. In the meantime, how many more people will be killed? Whatever your views, Before The Dawn is heartfelt and impassioned, and ends with a plea for peace. But it is difficult not to think of the words of Stephen Dedalus to Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject.’

Commissioned for the San Francisco Chronicle