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‘You know, Máiría, sometimes abusers are so manipulative that the abused actually enjoy it’ – Máiría Cahill’s new memoir on the IRA and encounters with Gerry Adams

In these extracts from her new book, the former senator describes the terrifying day she was summoned by the IRA after being sexually abused by one of its membersGerry Adams later said: ‘You know, Máiría, sometimes abusers are so manipulative that the people who are abused actually enjoy it’On confronting Mary Lou McDonald: ‘I wasn’t sure I was ready to face her without letting my anger spill over, but saw no harm in seeing the whites of her eyes’

Máiría Cahill

Today at 01:30

1 The IRA and me: “We need to see you about something”

​When the IRA came looking for me, I was waiting for a lift to Stormont. I was in a tizzy because in the rush to get ready for the car which was picking me up from the Sinn Féin Six County office, the hem on my blue trouser suit had caught in the heel of my boot and I had tripped over it and fallen. The office was behind a security door on the second floor of an old stone linen mill in Conway Street. ‘The Mill’, as everybody called it, also housed an education centre. My grandfather Frank had founded the centre, and some other social enterprise businesses for local people.

It was 1999. This was still a dangerous time in Northern Ireland and republicans felt vulnerable to attack, hence the full-time security man, Sean, whose job it was to watch the CCTV cameras and operate the big olive green steel door.

The buzzer sounded and Sean let the blonde woman in. She was in her 40s and pleasant looking, but with a noticeably inflamed nose. I didn’t know her personally, but had seen her a few times before and suspected by observing her hushed tones while speaking with other known republicans that she was probably an IRA member.

That’s the strange thing about west Belfast. The IRA is supposed to be the most secretive terrorist organisation in the world, but its members are made up of two kinds of people: those who want you to know they’re in it — the kind of people (men usually) who hold court in the pub on a Friday evening — and those who don’t but still behave weirdly, so much so that you can spot one (usually female) a mile off.

So, when this woman had come in a few times previously to talk to people in the Sinn Féin office, she had often poked her head around the door and said to someone: “Can I have a wee word with you?” and the two of them would go and whisper together in the next room.

It was unheard of for anyone not important within Belfast republicanism to have that level of access to the Sinn Féin floor. I stopped abruptly when she addressed me by my first name and asked if I had a minute. “I’m on my way to Stormont,” I said, and felt the colour draining from my face.

“It will only take a few seconds,” she replied, turning on her heel and beckoning me to follow her into the empty office next door.

I felt immediately this was not going to be a good conversation. The door closed behind me and I leaned my back against it. “We need to see you about something,” she half-whispered, standing close to my face. “Tonight.”

There was no need to ask who the “we” was, and she knew I knew. I asked what it was about. “I can’t tell you that but we need to see you. It’s important,” she said.

“Tell me now,” I replied, my voice rising. My face was flushed and I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back, my lilac shirt sticking to the damp fold under my armpits.

I was frightened, and she saw my fear. She put her hand on my shoulder and smiled. Three or four times I urged her to tell me what it was about, and each time she repeated that she couldn’t tell me but that I had to see “us” that night.

She also told me not to worry, but I wasn’t convinced. At that point Sean shouted that the car was outside, and I told her I had to go. She said she would collect me that evening at 7.30 from outside the Xtra-vision film rental shop on the Andersonstown Road. I didn’t think to ask her how she knew I lived near there. I assumed the IRA knew everything.

I don’t think any words can describe the feeling when you are summoned to a meeting by the IRA. I lived in west Belfast and was working voluntarily for Sinn Féin, its political wing, so meeting members of the IRA wasn’t unusual for me.

I worked and drank with them. Some of them were family members, so I had no feeling of fear being around them — until I became the focus of their attention. That changed everything. It was OK to be on the periphery of danger, to flirt with it even at protests during the marching season in Belfast, but being on the IRA’s radar was a very different and more perilous thing.

I knew that I had no option but to meet them and I was running scenarios in my head. Growing up, I had seen plenty of street fights and republican family feuds. The larger the family, the more mafia-like they behaved. I even once saw someone having their ear bitten off in the street. I came from a large family, but we did not lower ourselves to the laws of the concrete jungle. Neither did we fall foul of the “community”; in other words, the IRA.

​Where I come from, people have been beaten, abducted and shot for having affairs with the spouses of IRA members. I’ve been in living rooms where IRA members turned up to ask a woman to take back her alcoholic husband. Another friend was visited and told that she would not be allowed to leave her jailed male partner, because it would affect “prisoner morale”. I’ve seen young people shot in the knees at night, and others taken out and punched in the face for not standing up for the playing of the Irish national anthem in a bar. So not knowing which IRA members I was being taken to meet, where I was going, or what exactly it was about was terrifying.

Maybe they were trying to recruit me? How would I get myself out of that? A few weeks earlier, the former IRA leader of the H Blocks, Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, whom I knew well, had come quietly to let me know that the IRA were asking questions to try and build up a picture of my private life. Surely that was none of their business? But in west Belfast, everything was their business, so I couldn’t rule it out.

The uncertainty meant that I also didn’t know what the IRA would do to me. I had heard stories of people who had fallen foul of the organisation being beaten and tortured and dumped by the roadside. I thought I might be about to join them. That may sound ludicrous now, so many years after the Good Friday Agreement, but at that time, a year after the peace accord was signed, the fear was still very real. The IRA was still killing people, and still in near-total control of the area I lived in.

​In a normal world, if an armed organisation ordered you to meet them at night and you had a few hours’ grace, I imagine you would run like hell, or tell the police, or at least your family. I did nothing except torment myself. I wrote a note to my parents and hid it under my pillow. “The IRA did it and one of their names is xxxxxx. Ask R… who she is.”

Then I walked down the stairs, looked into the kitchen where my mum was standing at the sink washing the dishes, and closed the front door behind me. The woman who had summoned me was late. I stood at the corner of Andersonstown Road and Stockmans Lane feeling exposed and eyeing every car with suspicion. It was one of the longest 10 minutes of my life.

A small maroon car pulled into the layby and the driver leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. I got in. The car radio was on, playing pop music.

She apologised for being late. “It’s all right,” I said, as if we were on our way to some harmless social occasion.

She drove up the Andersonstown Road, past the housing estates of Mooreland and Owenvarragh and the GAA ground, Casement Park. I put my hand on the internal door handle and wondered what would happen if I opened it and jumped out into the busy traffic.

“There is still time,” I was telling myself, but I knew there wasn’t.

“Where are we going?”

“Not far,” she replied. I kept my hand on the door handle, though I was frozen to the seat in fear.

“Do you know what this is about?” she asked, turning the radio down.

“I think I have a fair idea,” I replied. I was doing what I always did when under pressure and scared. I became cheeky and tried to appear confident. I didn’t want to let her know how frightened and anxious I was.

I wanted her to think I did know why I was in that car so I could find out from her what was awaiting me. A few seconds of uncomfortable silence hung in the air between us. The smell of pine air freshener was making me nauseous.

“Is it a problem for you?” she asked.

“Well, you tell me what you want me here for and I’ll tell you if it’s a problem or not,” I countered.

She laughed and kept driving.

2 Gerry Adams: “I love you and we love you”

​Cahill was taken by the IRA woman, Breige Wright, to a flat in Kenard Avenue. A senior IRA member, Seamus Finucane, then appeared. Wright told her they were “the Army”. They said they’d heard she had spoken to people about a man called Marty Morris, the partner of her father’s sister, Ellen.

From the age of 16, she had been sexually abused by Morris on multiple occasions. Now, two years later, Wright told her: “He’s a volunteer in the IRA and as far as we’re concerned we can’t have abusers in our ranks if that is true, and we need to work out whether this is true or not, whether you are telling the truth or not.”

“We are viewing this as very serious,” Finucane said. Wright began firing deeply personal questions at her. “We are starting an investigation, a court of inquiry,” she said.

So began an inept and grotesquely insensitive internal IRA “investigation”. Cahill was subjected to round after round of interrogations by senior IRA men and women and doubt was cast on her account of what had been done to her.

After five months, her assailant was allowed to confront and denounce her. Eventually, Morris was permitted to vanish from Belfast while Sinn Féin and the IRA professed bafflement about his whereabouts. It later emerged that two other female members of Cahill’s family had also accused Morris of sexual abuse.

Soon after Morris’s disappearance, on August 8, 2000, Cahill met the Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, at his invitation. Adams was a family friend of long standing. Máiría’s uncle, Joe Cahill, was a former chief of staff of the Provisional IRA.

*****

​Adams was lounging back on his seat, feet up on the desk. He had a pair of Moses sandals on with the hairs on his toes poking through the gaps in the leather.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the sight of him. He had his hands clasped across his stomach, fingers entwined, almost priest-like. He motioned for me to sit down. I sat on the other side of the desk and waited for him to speak.

He took his time, looking at me and smiling before he said in his measured way: “Well so, have you questions for me?”

“No, it’s OK, I got all the answers to the questions I needed yesterday,” I said drily, meaning that I believed the IRA had moved Morris on.

He swung his feet off the desk and his eyes flashed briefly. I felt the burn. He tapped his fingers but recovered his outward serenity just as quickly as his mask had slipped. I was surprised at the flash; I had never experienced that side of him before and it scared me a bit.

​I had known Gerry Adams since I was a child and was used to seeing him in the company of my relatives. I saw him frequently in the radio station, the festival office and in west Belfast at events where he would always offer me a hug.

Later I worked in an office two down from his. I was used to his fun side, his childish antics — like the time he hopped all over pages I was photocopying or confiscated my Down GAA colours that I had hung in the office to taunt his support of Antrim.

Of course I had also seen him in serious mode on the television, but I was not used to an angry Gerry up close and personal. “Look, I’m under pressure here and I can’t understand for the life of me why youse waded in to do this. I want a guarantee that this is not going to happen to anyone again,” I said to him.

“You need to take your time, Máiría. This was a unique situation and the resolution has not been great for anybody,” he said.

I exhaled in frustration: “Look, Gerry, what has all this been about, you’re not getting this, why have youse put me through all of this — and there certainly has been no resolution for me.”

I wasn’t about to play the game of making a distinction about who had what position within the republican movement. I spoke about him and the “Army” as one and the same entity, and he didn’t correct me. He smiled and tapped his fingers on his beard, then said he didn’t know Morris.

It was my turn to get angry: “You don’t know Marty Morris, Gerry, do ya not? He’s been sitting on the festival management committee with you for the last three years, he’s been a member of the IRA in the Murph [Ballymurphy] for the last 20 or so, he’s an ex-prisoner, he works in the resource centre, you were invited to his wedding, and he’s the public face of CRJ [Community Restorative Justice], and you don’t know him? Do you think I’m simple?”

He smiled again and shifted slightly in his seat. “What I meant is I don’t know him very well, he’s not a personal friend. I want to say I’m sorry on behalf of the republican family for what happened to you. I know from my own experiences of talking to people who have been abused like you that it is very damaging, and I know that your abuse has been traumatic. I believe you.”

That emphasis on the “you”, I took to mean that either he wanted me to think that he didn’t believe the IRA about their thoughts on my abuse, or he wanted me to think that the IRA didn’t believe me. I let him continue. He talked about me being bright and having a future ahead of me, and about Morris escaping. He said that the “Army” had told him that it was a mistake and he said that he didn’t know Briege Wright well but he had heard she was a good girl.

I retorted, “You want to be slapping the head of Seamy Finucane well, for he’s a f**king arsehole.” He grimaced a bit and told me that some people would say Seamy was a respected volunteer.

I told him I didn’t respect him, and that the IRA should never have become involved in things like this. He said he had been told that the whole thing had stalled the first time because I couldn’t give enough detail about the abuse.

I asked him to put himself in the head of an 18-year-old who had been through what I had, and then try to talk out loud in front of three IRA people, one of them male, about what had happened. He said that the republican movement was not always equipped to deal with “cases like this”. He never mentioned social services, or the police.

He told me that I needed to concentrate on healing myself and that if I thought I needed any help he would try his best. He told me that some people thought of suicide when they were abused but it wasn’t the answer.

He asked me if I wanted him to ask the IRA any questions. I said I wanted to know why they had let Morris go where he would have access to other children, and were they going to try and find him? He replied that his understanding was they hadn’t let him go but he was not sure about the second question.

He got up from where he was sitting and came round and sat beside me, the window behind him. I was tired and looked out of the window. A tourist bus went by with people taking photos just outside the window on the top deck.

It was a strange feeling. I began to watch the traffic; it was a good distraction for me so that I wouldn’t cry.

We spoke about the impact the rapes and abuse had had on me. He was going on about abusers and about how they could manipulate their victims. He talked about how they made them afraid, and how they groomed them.

“You know, Máiría, sometimes abusers are so manipulative that the people who are abused actually enjoy it.”

That brought me back to my senses and I snapped: “Well I didn’t f**king enjoy it! And another thing, Gerry, yes, I do have a question for you. Do you really expect me to believe that you have known nothing of this when Siobhán [O’Hanlon] has known about it for years? Do you expect me to believe that she didn’t come in and tell you at any stage that this could potentially blow? Do you think that I’m that stupid? I don’t believe you.”

Siobhán, who I had first confided in, was Adams’s adviser and secretary; it was inconceivable that she had not forewarned him of the potential damage this could do to the republican movement if it leaked. I believed he had known about it from the initial stages of the investigation at least.

He took a breath and stroked his beard again. He put his hand on my knee, saying, “I love you and we love you.”

I looked at him but said nothing. There was a short silence which began to grow uncomfortable. He asked me to give him a hug. I did and he kissed my cheek. My head started to spin.

“You know I’m here if you need me, we’re here.”

There was no point in continuing. I looked at him again. “I just want Morris back so that he can admit what he has done and so that no wee child ever goes through that again.”

Then I coldly thanked him for his time and walked out.

3 Mary Lou McDonald: “If that did happen, it was wrong”

​Early in 2010 Cahill went public with her allegations in a Sunday Tribune interview and also reported them to the PSNI.

Morris subsequently faced 22 charges in connection with alleged abuse, including rape and, separately, with being a member of the IRA.

A third trial centred on terrorism charges related to the IRA’s internal “investigation” into Morris. Those accused were Seamus Finucane, Breige Wright, Padraic Wilson, and Agnes ‘Maura’ McCrory.

All five were found not guilty after the cases collapsed when Máiría Cahill withdrew support for the prosecution, citing loss of confidence. The Starmer report in 2015 led to an apology from the then DPP, Barra McGrory, who said “no fault or blame attaches to Máiría Cahill. The public prosecution service let you down and for that I am sorry.”

Later than year, Cahill co-operated with a BBC Spotlight documentary, A Woman Alone with the IRA.

In February 2018, Mary Lou McDonald succeeded Adams as president of Sinn Féin. That September, a Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland report found the police force failed Cahill and had been in receipt of intelligence since August 2000 that the IRA was investigating Morris’s abuse, but had taken no action.

Intelligence also suggested Morris was suspended from Sinn Féin in August 2000, three years after Sinn Féin members first became aware of Cahill’s allegations.

McDonald apologised “unreservedly” to Cahill, saying she regretted Sinn Féin did not have mandatory reporting procedures in place at the time.

The following week, McDonald denied there had been any Sinn Féin cover-up, saying: “It simply didn’t happen.”

Cahill, who had briefly been a Labour Party senator from 2015-16, said she wanted to meet the new Sinn Féin leader.

*****

​I told the media that if Mary Lou McDonald was still denying Sinn Féin was involved in a cover-up of abuse, she should meet with me and say so to my face.

To my surprise, I received an email from her, asking me to meet her at Leinster House. I had been invited to attend a group photograph the next week for all past and present female parliamentarians, and agreed to a meeting on the same day.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to face her without letting my anger spill over, but saw no harm in seeing the whites of her eyes.

Aideen Blackwood, who had worked with me in the Seanad, offered to come with me and take minutes. We arrived around 10 minutes early in the Leinster House 2000 building, a smart, modern annex off the main parliament building.

The room had soft furnishings and low lighting, and I was happy enough with it, until someone came to tell us that Sinn Féin had changed the room at the last minute, and we were to move downstairs to another, smaller room.

We got there, and I extended my hand to the young man Mary Lou had brought with her. He sat in silence, not meeting my eyes as I tried to engage in conversation about mundane things like the weather. He was clearly uncomfortable, and if my talking to him was making him more so, then I was going to keep talking.

McDonald arrived shortly afterwards and extended her hand to me. I shook it, and she sat down. So far, so cordial. But it was about to turn politely sour, and did so fairly quickly.

The following account is taken from Aideen Blackwood’s notes made at the time of our meeting and my own notes made immediately afterwards.

McDonald opened the meeting by telling me she was there to listen. I said to her: “Well, I’m here to listen too, so it looks like both of us are going to be doing a lot of listening.”

She apologised as leader of Sinn Féin that the party members I disclosed my abuse to in the late 1990s had not reported it to the police.

I then asked her if she accepted that there was an IRA investigation into my abuse. She replied that she could only deal with things that as the leader of Sinn Féin she was responsible for. I told her: “I think in that case, there is not much point in me continuing with this meeting, because I think it will be a waste of my time,” and got up to go.

She asked me to stay a minute, and extended her arms in a conciliatory gesture. I agreed to give her more than a minute, aware that if I walked out, it would look terrible for her, but I also wanted to challenge her.

She said she hadn’t seen the Ombudsman report, and I pointed out that she had accepted it a few weeks previously, when she issued her apology after its release. I said to her: “The evidence is there, and I am not accepting that from you, and I mean no disrespect by saying that. You are saying you don’t have access to the facts, but you were content in 2014 to say I was slurring Sinn Féin.”

She replied that saying Sinn Féin was covering up abuse was a generalised slur.

“There was a cover-up,” I said, angrily. “What else would you call it when people deny there was an IRA investigation into abuse, or moving perpetrators around the country — I think you know there was an IRA investigation, and you are saying you don’t.”

She denied that she knew that there was an IRA investigation. I became extremely frustrated, and told her: “And by the way, see this business about Adams and the rest saying I was told to go to the RUC? It’s a load of nonsense and you know it and I know it. I was not told to go to the RUC, and even if I had gone to the RUC at the time, they would not have been able to investigate it, because the IRA involved themselves.”

She told me she wasn’t there to adjudicate on the criminal justice system. Aideen was furiously scribbling away and shaking her head from time to time, while I was trying to contain my temper. Mary Lou looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Mary Lou: I know that is your story, that is what you say happened, and if that did happen it was wrong.

Me: Not ‘if it happened’, it did happen, and I know it happened, and you know it happened.

Mary Lou: Those you say carried out this, very strongly dispute this. The court case is the proper place to decide that.

Me: Do you believe as a human being, not as a politician, that there was an IRA investigation into my abuse?

Mary Lou: I don’t know. I haven’t been party to conversations about that.

This was interesting, because McDonald had appeared in the media in 2014 confirming that she had spoken to one of the women who was part of “this kangaroo court”. I wasn’t quick enough to remind her of this.

Instead, I replied: “I find that astonishing, that you have been more than happy to go out in the media over the last four years in defence of them, and you’re saying you haven’t had any conversations with these people, who are still members of your party?

“Did you not think of lifting the phone and saying ‘what’s the craic lads’ before you did your media interviews? That’s poor judgment — no offence.”

“If you want answers,” she said, “I am not the person to give them to you.”

“I don’t want answers,” I replied angrily. “I know what happened to me and I believe that you know too. These people are still members of your party.”

She told me that she had accepted “that that is your account of what happened”.

She hadn’t moved far enough, and the meeting became a quick-fire round of to-ing and fro-ing where I made points to her and she did her best to counter them.

I told her what she was saying was “bullshit”.

“It isn’t bullshit,” she shot back, before telling me that when allegations are made of a serious or criminal nature, then no action should be taken or view formed until criminal processes are complete.

I replied: “Well, I think that stance from you is hypocritical because you haven’t waited for results or evidence in other cases before forming a view.”

​Then I caught her in a problem of her own making. She was trying to communicate to me why she believed I had been abused, by saying that three people alleged abuse by Morris.

I said: “That’s very interesting so just to make sure I am hearing you right. You based your decision on the fact that because other people said it happened?”

She confirmed that this was her position. I knew I had her, and said: “OK, well are you aware that I was not the only person who told the police there was an IRA investigation?” I told her that the other two victims had also told police that they were questioned about their abuse.

I asked her: “Based on that knowledge now, and that you have said was based on the strength of three complainants, do you believe there was an IRA investigation?”

She said she hadn’t “seen that evidence”, and I told her it was publicly available.

I added: “You continue to have people in your party who don’t believe they have done anything wrong. There was a pattern of behaviour within the republican movement, I know this to be fact because I have been contacted by victims and by people across the country.

“And those people watched how you and your party treated me and they are too frightened to make complaints, and that is despicable, and rest assured, at some point those complaints will be made, and I have absolutely no faith in Sinn Féin procedures. No faith in Sinn Féin or IRA members co-operating with the courts.

“When I originally gave an interview to the Sunday Tribune, no one from SF denied an IRA investigation then, Adams didn’t even deny it. Both [Padraic] Wilson and [Seamus] Finucane issued public statements, neither denied it then — in fact Finucane said he wished to state that he did have a role to play. On whose behalf was he acting if he wasn’t acting on behalf of the IRA — Sinn Féin’s?”

McDonald replied: “He was not acting on behalf of Sinn Féin. No one from Sinn Féin investigated abuse.”

That wasn’t strictly true, because Siobhán O’Hanlon, Gerry Adams’s secretary, had been pulled into both the first and second investigations. She had also made Adams’s personal office available when he wasn’t there, so that the IRA women could speak to me.

But I had already made myself perfectly clear to McDonald, and it was obvious the meeting was going round in circles.

I decided to ask her a few final questions. “Do you accept that your party treated me badly from the point when I went public?”

She replied: “From your point of view, yes, I can see that, I think it’s fair to say that but that wasn’t the intention. The whole thing got very highly politicised.”

I rolled my eyes: “Well, what do you expect, you’re a political party. If it had been a bishop and a load of paedophile priests, everyone would have been out commenting on it, including yourselves. You said I slurred your party!”

She retracted the word “slur”. I responded: “The very least that I am owed by Sinn Féin after everything you’ve done is that you admit the IRA investigated my abuse and brought me into a room with my abuser, the very least.”

I became upset when she asked me something about Morris, and I faltered. Aideen, concerned, put her hand out to me in a gesture of solidarity. I held up my hand to her, indicating that I was OK to continue, and watched McDonald’s eyes flick across both of our hand gestures.

I told her: “You are giving these people cover as leader of Sinn Féin. The graffiti on the walls and the online comments from your members are out of order, and not one of you, except for the time you commented about that blog has stood up and said this should stop.”

She reiterated her opposition to abusive comments. I then asked her specifically: “Go back to those named individuals and ask them if they investigated abuse.”

She said she would not be involving herself in that. I kept talking over her: “Come back and tell me the answers they give you — it’s difficult to believe you haven’t had that conversation with them. You have abdicated your responsibility as a human being and as a political leader, you’ve been out over and over in the media, and you are giving these people cover by doing so. And you tell Gerry Adams from me that he knows he’s a liar, and I know he’s a liar.”

I was getting up to leave, and lifted my handbag. “By the way,” I said, “I’m also not happy with how your press office dealt with Spotlight,” meaning that the party had not answered the list of detailed questions they had been sent.

“Well, Máiría,” she said in what I took to be a sarcastic tone, “I’ll be sure to let them know.”

The meeting did not end with a handshake or any pleasantries, and it took me a while to calm down after it. I told RTÉ, when a journalist called me, that I had entered the meeting with low expectations and had left with even lower ones.

​These are abridged extracts from ‘Rough Beast: My Story & the Reality of Sinn Féin’ by Máiría Cahill, to be published by Head of Zeus on Thursday​

‘Rough Beast: My Story & the Reality of Sinn Féin’ by Máiría Cahill, published by Head of Zeus