The Irish Times

The Irish Times is presented as a venue for public argument about the legacy of the conflict: its significance here lies not simply in reporting claims, but in giving space to interpretations of what those claims mean. Eamonn McCann’s commentary tests Gerry Adams’s rejection of accounts by Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price; later, a columnist considers a government report suggesting that the Provisional IRA’s leadership retained influence over Sinn Féin. Together, these appearances place the paper within debates over testimony, political authority, and the boundary between armed and electoral politics.

Commentary on testimony and silence

McCann’s intervention addresses Adams’s contention that Hughes and Price should be dismissed because they were aggrieved opponents of the peace process. McCann accepts that resentment, bitterness, and personal demons may have shaped their decision to speak. But he argues that those feelings do not establish that they invented accusations. He instead proposes that the two may have broken the IRA’s code of secrecy because they believed Adams and his associates had made that code meaningless through their political strategy. His analysis shifts attention from the witnesses’ grievances alone to the circumstances in which they chose to testify.

Price’s own stated purpose sharpened that dispute: she wanted to put Adams where she believed he belonged. McCann’s reading therefore leaves the reader with a question of interpretation rather than a simple verdict. A motive to settle scores may explain why someone speaks, but does not, by itself, decide whether the account is true.

Commentary on the post-conflict political order

In 2015, a report released by Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers, based on work by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and British intelligence, said that the principal paramilitary groups from the conflict remained in existence. It described the Provisional IRA as operating in a much-reduced form, with access to weapons, while stating that it was no longer engaged in violence and had a wholly political focus. The report also conveyed the view among rank-and-file members that the IRA Army Council continued to control both the organisation and Sinn Féin through an overarching strategy.

An Irish Times columnist argued that the report appeared to reinforce the image of men and women in balaclavas directing the political show. That interpretation exposed the tension within the report’s account: an organisation described as politically focused and no longer violent was also said to retain a leadership structure whose influence reached into party politics. The newspaper’s role in this passage is to register the political implication of that tension, not to present the report as proof of a continuing armed campaign.