SF’s Candidate For Phoenix Park Has Drunk Deep Of The Adams’ Kool-Aid

Many thanks to S. for this tip off…..

As most readers of this blog will be aware, Sinn Fein this weekend chose Euro-MP, Liadh Ni Riada as their candidate to fight Michael D this October for the right to sleep in the Aras for the next seven years.

I heard an RTE radio interview with her recently and was quite impressed. She sounded intelligent and refreshingly un-Stepford Wife-like.

Later I realised that the interviewer had not asked her the questions that perform for SF members the same function as a button does on a robot; press it and the robot goes into a pre-programmed mode. So the impression I got of her may have been somewhat misleading.

Liadh O Riada (l) and SF leader Mary Lou McDonald pose for the press after O Riada was selected as candidate for the presidency

That button is, of course, any question about Gerry Adams’ near three decade career as a local and national leader of the Provisional IRA.

Back in November 2013, after she had been selected as a Sinn Fein Euro candidate, she gave an interview to the Irish Daily Mail’s Jason O’Toole who, being the proficient reporter that he is, did press the robot’s button.

I doubt whether Liadh ni Riada’s answers would be any different if the same questions put to her in 2013 were asked of her today. Even though Gerry Adams has stepped down from the leadership, it seems that no Sinn Feiner has the courage, if not to tell the truth about Adams, then to at least avoid telling intelligence-insulting lies about his life.

Gerry Adams is Sinn Fein’s Stalin. When will the party gather up the courage and produce its Krushchev?

Until that happens Sinn Fein must expect a sceptical response when the party insists that Mary Lou is her own boss.

This is how The Cedar Lounge Revolution reported the exchange back in November 2013:

Liadh Ní Riada

She has been chosen as Sinn Féin’s candidate for the new Europe South constituency which is expected to include most of Munster and part of south Leinster. Currently Sinn Féin’s Irish language development officer, Liadh says that she fully supports party leader Gerry Adams. As well as stating that she believes Adams’ declaration that he was not in the IRA — which most people find incredulous — Liadh also says that she believes the Sinn Féin leader had nothing to do with the brutal murder of Jean McConville, despite the fact he has been accused of ordering her death by former IRA members Bernard Hughes and Dolours Price.

‘It’s very easy to throw accusations and I don’t see any grounding or any basis for that and obviously I support Gerry 100 per cent. ‘It’s terribly unfair that they focus on these things with no basis and yet they don’t focus on all the good work he’s done for the Good Friday peace process. ‘It’s a terribly unbalanced, prejudiced view, which I think is completely without basis.’ She also doesn’t buy into the view that Adams has been damaged by the revelations about how he didn’t report his brother Liam to the police for sexually abusing his daughter Áine for some years after he first became aware of it. Liadh says that nobody ‘in their right mind would be supportive of any abuse or cover up’. She adds: ‘As far as I know, he was acting on his niece’s best interests. ‘It’s a family private matter and again putting it out in the public like that I think it’s again distracting from some of the good works that Gerry does. ‘He consistently tops the polls. He has 100 per cent support from the party. So it’s a no-brainer in that sense for me.’