The decision by the UK Supreme Court this morning to rule Gerry Adams’ imprisonment as an internee in 1973 illegal, and by implication that his jail sentence for attempting to escape from Long Kesh was also ultra vires, has some intriguing implications.

Not least of these is that at a stroke Adams may well have lost his qualification to be a member of the Irish Republican Felons Association, popularly called ‘The Felons’ but better known for the drinking club it runs on the Andersonstown Road which was situated within stone throwing distance of the local RUC station.

The Felons Club, circa 2020 – it has grown and prospered, like some of its members, with the peace process

To lose his membership would be a particularly bitter blow for Gerry Jnr since his father, Gerry Snr, was a co-founder of  the Felons along with a fellow republican called Joe Campbell (presumably something Adams Snr did in his spare time when he was not sexually abusing his children).

Danny Morrison wrote an interesting account of the origin of the Felons for The Guardian back in 1999 which you can read here in which he says that initially internees were not qualified to be members since only sentenced IRA members were real felons.

That rule was bent when the current Troubles began and so Gerry Jnr qualified on both grounds, as an ex-internee and as a felon who had served jail time for trying to escape from internment in Long Kesh.

Both qualifications for Felons membership have now been struck out by the UK Supreme Court, the internment order and the subsequent jail sentence. So Gerry Adams is now an ex-felon  He could always apply for honorary membership but that doesn’t quite carry the same cachet.

So, what’s an ex-Felon to do? Answers on a postcard to thebrokenelbow.com.

Thanks to PP for bringing this to my attention:

President Trump said he and Vice President Mike Pence, as well as the White House staff, would now be tested on a daily basis.

By Michael Crowley and Michael D. Shear

• May 7, 2020

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Thursday that the White House staff would be tested every day for the coronaviru after a military aide who has had contact with him was found to have the virus.

The graph below, published this a.m. on the Axios website, shows that just as Trump prepares to scale down the Covid-19 crisis, amid suspicions he is prioritizing a revived economy so as to get re-elected, the evidence is that far from the curve flattening or declining, it is rising everywhere in Trump’s America outside of New York:

Thanks to PS for alerting me to this 2018 blog post on the unexplained resignation from the Privy Council of prominent legal figure, Seamus Treacy, who in another age represented numerous clients of Madden & Finucane, said in some circles to be the IRA’s favourite legal firm. Followers of my journalism over the years will remember that Treacy first came to the attention of a wide public when I revealed in The Sunday Tribune that he and a colleague were objecting to a rule in the legal profession that to advance to Queen’s Counsel (QC), barristers had to swear an oath of loyalty to Her Majesty. He challenged that ruling in the courts and won, and thereafter, as the peace process gathered momentum, his career blossomed and he was soon a judge and then an appeal court judge. With the latter elevation came promotion to the privy council where, unsurprisingly, the need to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch is taken a bit more seriously than in Chichester Street, in Belfast – after all the Privy Council is the monarch’s council. His decision to quit the Privy Council happened without explanation and went unnoticed by the media with the sole exception of The Daily Mail. So we are all left in the dark and puzzled about the sudden turn of events that led to LJ Treacy’s resignation. All the more puzzling is that as part of his rise to the dizzy heights of the NI judiciary, the journey involved the acceptance of a knighthood; that is a knight of the realm, the Queen’s realm that is.

Sir Seamus Treacy, whose decision to quit the Privy Council two years ago remains a mystery

You can read more detail and background in this post on the venerablepuzzle.com : https://venerablepuzzle.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/sir-seamus-treacy-the-privy-council-and-northern-ireland/