DUBLIN — Former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams has won a €100,000 libel judgment against the BBC after a Dublin jury found that the broadcaster had falsely connected him to a 2006 Irish Republican Army killing.
Friday’s ruling marked the latest legal victory for Adams, 76, who led Sinn Féin from 1983 to 2018. He has become the most senior in a long list of Sinn Féin figures to pursue journalists with the aid of Ireland’s unusually plaintiff-friendly libel laws.
These commonly place the burden of proof on the defendant — and that can prove an impossibly high bar when reporting on reputed chieftains of the Provisional IRA. That outlawed group killed nearly 1,800 people before calling a 1997 cease-fire in the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland.
Flanked by his legal team outside Dublin’s Four Courts, Adams said he had filed his lawsuit to “put manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation.”
Adams again denied any involvement in the slaying of Denis Donaldson.
Donaldson, a Provisional IRA veteran, had been appointed Sinn Féin’s senior office administrator at the Stormont Parliamentary Building in Belfast. He was killed with a point-blank shotgun blast months after admitting — at a 2005 press conference alongside an ashen-faced Adams — that he had served as a British intelligence agent operating secretly within Sinn Féin-IRA circles for more than a decade. As Adams himself has noted in the past, any admission of “informing” typically results in an IRA death sentence.
In its 2016 documentary on the Donaldson slaying, BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight program interviewed a former IRA and Sinn Féin member, identified only as “Martin,” who claimed that Adams had final sign-off on the killing.
Speaking outside the courthouse, Adam Smyth, director of BBC Northern Ireland, said the jury’s award for Adams would have a “profound” effect on journalists vulnerable to the Republic of Ireland’s libel laws.
“If the BBC’s case cannot be won under existing Irish defamation law, it’s hard to see how anyone’s could,” Smyth said.
For decades, Adams has been identified in every credible history of the Irish republican movement as a Provisional IRA commander since at least 1972, when British authorities freed him from prison to participate in the Provisionals’ first face-to-face truce talks with U.K. government ministers in London.
The Irish government, citing its own security services, says Adams stepped down from the IRA’s ruling “army council” only in 2005 when the group formally renounced violence and disarmed.
Yet Adams has insisted he was never in the IRA — a position repeated at the end of each episode of Disney’s recent acclaimed series “Say Nothing” that depicted Adams as, indeed, a key IRA figure involved in orchestrating Belfast bloodshed from the early 1970s onward.
That TV show was based on a book about the IRA’s 1972 abduction, execution and secret burial of a Belfast mother of 10. Adams was arrested in 2014 over claims he oversaw the IRA unit responsible but was released without charge.
Since then, Adams has successfully sued the British government to quash the only criminal convictions in his record — for trying to escape from prison in 1973 and 1974 while being interned without trial as an IRA suspect.
This time, after a three-week trial, the 11-member jury ruled that the BBC’s Spotlight program and a follow-up online article had damaged Adams’ reputation by contending that he had sanctioned Donaldson’s killing. Jurors rejected the BBC’s defense that reporting the allegations against Adams was “fair, reasonable and in the public interest.”
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