Adams’ own goal distracts from our political limbo

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Gerry Adams’ by-now notorious tweet “Watching Django Unchained – A Ballymurphy N****r!” was dramatic enough to distract from the current preoccupation of political correspondents: watching paint slowly dry as Government formation talks continue.

It was as good as telling his local radio station LMFM on Tuesday morning that he has never considered himself white. That does not excuse him by any manner or means. N stands for never. There were no grounds for using it.

Adams has come out with some very strange tweets in his time, but the misjudgement and inappropriateness involved in this one were galling and immediate.

The word is racist and a slur. It is not appropriate to use it in any circumstances. Full stop.

Before he became Taoiseach, Enda Kenny told a joke to a private gathering in which the ’N’ word was uttered. It leaked out to the media then and Kenny was forced to make an abject apology. If it was wrong for Kenny back then to use it, it was still wrong for Adams to use it now.

Indeed, Adams (or those who advise him) knew it was wrong on Sunday night and the tweet was hastily removed after ten minutes.

The Sinn Féin leader should have issued a contrite apology for the appalling gaffe (and by any yardstick, the tweet was crass).

Sure, the word is used liberally throughout the film – a Quentin Tarantino gorefest – but so what? It’s a work of fiction, not the real world.

Instead of an apology, we witnessed a drawn-out self-serving series of tweets and statements putting it all into context over the next twelve hours.

The subliminal message: anyone who knows Gerry knows he does not have a racist bone in his body and is never wrong and can never be challenged on anything he says.

It was pretty numbing stuff. It shows either how much Adams’s mistakes (and they are mounting) are indulged within Sinn Féin; or how out-of-touch he and his kitchen cabinet are.

First up was a tweet: “Any1 who saw Django would know my tweets & N-word were ironic. Nationalists in Nth were treated like African Americans.”

The thesis behind this ‘context’ tweet was that the experience of Northern nationalists was somehow equivalent to the experience of African Americans. Cromwell and 800 years of perfidious Albion were drawn in.

And in a statement released in the early hours of Monday morning as the controversy went international, Adams implied those who took offence had only themselves to blame.

“If anyone is genuinely offended by my use of the N-word they misunderstand or misrepresent the context in which it was used. For this reason I deleted the tweets.”

So they were wrong. Not him.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.