"Gerry Adams remains in custody over McConville murder, so he does"

From the BBC:

Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams continues to be questioned by Northern Ireland police in connection with the 1972 murder of Jean McConville, so he does.

Mr Adams has spent the night in custody after going to Antrim police station, so he has, where he was arrested.

Speaking before his detention on Wednesday evening, Mr Adams said he was "innocent of any part" in the murder, so he did.

Mrs McConville, a 37-year-old widow and mother-of-10, was abducted and shot by the IRA, so she was.

It's hard to guess which one is telling a bare-faced lie...

From the BBC:

The prime minister told MPs Mr Adams had accepted a role as "Baron of the Manor of Northstead"... To laughter from MPs, he added: "I'm not sure that Gerry Adams will be delighted to be Baron of the Manor of Northstead. But nonetheless I'm pleased that tradition has been maintained."

However, a spokesperson for Sinn Fein said that Mr Adams' only communication with the House of Commons had been a letter of resignation to the speaker.

The most likely explanation is that they are both lying, of course, which still leaves us none the wiser...
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UPDATE 27 Jan: From the BBC:

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow has ruled that Gerry Adams has been disqualified from Parliament. Earlier, Downing Street had apologised to Mr Adams after the prime minister said he had accepted a Crown title...

Later on Wednesday, Mr Adams said that when he was told of Mr Cameron's remarks it was the first he had "heard of this development". In a statement he said the claim that he had accepted a crown title was "untrue" and that he had "simply resigned". "I am an Irish republican," he said, "I have had no truck whatsoever with these antiquated and quite bizarre aspects of the British parliamentary system."

Sinn Fein: Cutting the crap

Disclaimer: I do not much of like their politics and have no personal sympathy for Gerry Adams etc etc, but hats off to his spokesman, from here:

Under procedures dating back to 1642, MPs are forbidden from formally resigning their seats. They must apply for a position of profit under the crown, which automatically disqualifies them from being a member of the House of Commons. Under those rules, Mr Adams has to apply to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to become Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. The other office is Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, a role currently unavailable as it is held by former Strangford MP Iris Robinson...

The rules, available on parliament's website, suggest that the problem cannot be solved by appointing Mr Adams to the role, regardless of his own wishes. They state that an MP wishing to retire must apply themselves to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

A Sinn Fein spokesperson has told the BBC that Mr Adams has no intention of doing so. He said: "It's a non-issue from our perspective. He submitted his resignation and that's it. He's stepped down from that position. He certainly didn't apply for the Stewardship of the Manor of Northstead."

Knowledge Is Power

Without wishing to get bogged down in taking sides in the debate over the future of Northern Ireland (stay integral part of UK; devolution; independence; or (re)join Republic of Ireland?), until recently I always had the impression that Labour's policy in NI was doomed to failure; their way of maintaining a fragile peace was to buy off the 'leaders' of the warring factions by paying them Danegeld.

It's a simple trick, actually, and it was Red Ken Livingstone who inadvertently stumbled across this in the 1980s. What the GLC did was set up all sorts of quangos and working groups etc at taxpayers' expense to deal with wimmin's rights, gay rights, anti-racism and anti-nuclear campaigners etc. Once the figureheads of proper grassroots movements get their snouts in the trough, with a nice office and personal assistants and so on, they get increasingly bogged down in small "p" political warfare with the bureaucracy, and end up just defending their own little fiefdoms, rather than actually campaigning for anything in particular. In the jargon, this is referred to as 'going native', or more crudely, 'selling out'.

So what Labour did (and quite possibly the Tories before them) was shower leaders of IRA/Sinn Fein, DUP, UUP, SDLP and so on with money and the trappings of power; as well as creating a shed-load of taxpayer-funded jobs. It's a tricky game of course, if an arch republican gets too close to an arch unionist, then this erodes the gap between 'leaders' and the grassroots, so you get breakaway movements, and then there are more people you have to pay off and so on. But similarly, once you have enough little breakaway movements, you don't really need to worry about them too much.

So far so good, a bit of a dead-end, you may think, but it strikes me that The Powers That Be were very busy behind the scenes on the "give 'em enough rope" basis.

Think about it, what are the three big stories to come out of Northern Ireland recently?

1. Gerry Adams' brother was reported to be a paedophile, it is implied that Gerry Adams knew all about this, all very embarrassing and a bit of a blow to the credibility of the IRA.

2. Iris Robinson (who was simultaneously the wife of DUP leader Peter Robinson, himself First Minister, an MP, a member of the NI Assembly and probably a local councillor as well) was the subject of a suspiciously well-researched BBC programme which reported that she'd had an affair and brokered loans between property developers and her young friend. Her husband had to stand down while an enquiry was carried out; miraculously, this was all done and dusted in a few weeks and he was then back in office.

3. A major bone of contention between the warring factions was whether the NI Assembly would assume responsibility for police and justice or not, and this argument had been rumbling on ever since the Assembly was set up. Somehow or other, a happy outcome of the enquiry into Peter Robinson more or less coincided with the factions finally reaching agreement that they would do so.

I would guess that stories 1. and 2. were actually shots across the bows of all politicians in NI; a lot of them must have had some dealings with the paramilitary groups and know that their immunity from charges was not guaranteed; similarly, if you give politicians plenty of money and the trappings of power without real responsibility, they will get involved in all sorts of stuff that they wouldn't want to be made known to the public or their own supporters.

So, like in a proper spy novel, each and every one of them realised that unless they did what the UK (and to a lesser extent the Irish) government(s) wanted, they may well be next to have a light shone on the skeletons in their particular closet, and so all of a sudden, they fell into line*. Whether this is a viable long-term strategy for maintaining the peace in NI, only time will tell, of course.

Just thinkin' out loud, is all.

* Rather more worryingly, the EU might be trying exactly the same strategies with openly anti-EU MEPs in specific (getting them to 'go native') and with debasing Europe's national parliaments in general (the Devil makes work for idle hands - see e.g. the MPs' expenses 'scandal'). The trick certainly worked with that arch-trougher Neil Kinnock, who earlier in his career had been quite anti-EEC. Hmm.

I blame the parents