Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams has remembered the three IRA members shot dead by SAS officers in Gibraltar 25 years ago, while writing in his blog called ‘Leargás’ this week. Leargás is the Irish for ‘insight’ or ‘vision’.

A Gibraltar Coroner’s inquest concluded in 1988 that the three had been legally killed and were here as part of a planned bombing mission.

 

In his blog Mr Adams describes Mairéad Farrell, Dan McCann and Sean Savage as three extraordinary republicans who “repeatedly demonstrated courage; resilience in the face of brutality, imprisonment and hunger strike; compassion; loyalty and a fierce commitment to building a different society on this island – a better Ireland – than that in which they had grown up.”

Sharing the impact their deaths had to family members he said it was a “huge blow” for them to be robbed of “three warm, loving, and compassionate human beings,” who “still had much to offer the republican struggle, their communities and Ireland.”

According to Mr Adams the three “had read Tone Connolly and Pearse and all the great Irish thinkers.” Referring to Wolfe Tone, James Connolly and Pádraig Pearse who were all leaders in the 1916 Easter Rising. “They were with Connolly in his belief in the re-conquest of Ireland by the Irish people. But they also understood that an elite cannot free Ireland,” said Mr Adams.

The mentioning of the death of the three IRA members is a lead in to what Sinn Féín are doing in 2013, where Mr Adams says they are “taking Connolly’s maxim and our core republican values and making them relevant in our time and in our place of activism.”

He mentioned new strategies and new policies and just how it was 25 years ago, “it is about achieving a united independent Ireland,” but also acknowledges that as the struggle for freedom continues it takes a different form from that in the past.

In his bid to rally support ‘for the cause’ Mr Adams ends his blog with the words: “Join Sinn Féin. Join with us and help achieve the goals that Mairead and Dan and Sean and many others died for.”