'Hey bby gurl': How Gerry Adams is serially insensitive to abuse victims

In January of this year, it put up a picture of Neville Longbottom, a character in the Harry Potter series, with the caption: "Hey bby gurl, I got something LONG 4 ur BOTTOM." The picture was retweeted and favourited a large number of times by other users. No surprises there. Puerile, adolescent toilet humour will always find an audience.

What was curious is that, amongst those who favourited it, was Gerry Adams.

It's difficult to think of another political leader who would have considered that an appropriate thing to do. Much less one whose party was involved at the time in an ongoing controversy around its treatment of sexual abuse victims. Much less again one in which the controversy centred on his own family.

The tweet appeared in the same month that Liam Adams launched an appeal against his conviction the previous October on three counts of rape, four of indecent assault and three of gross indecency against his own daughter Aine, the Sinn Fein President's niece, between the ages of four and nine. Gerry Adams' handling of this matter was severely criticised at the time. Questions still remain.

Why Adams favourited this particular tweet is, of course, impossible to say. Twitter's guidelines state: "Favouriting a Tweet can let the original poster know that you liked their Tweet, or you can save the Tweet for later." Whichever it was in this instance, two possibilities suggest themselves.

The first is that Adams realised the "bby gurl" reference was inappropriate at best, and downright tasteless and offensive at worst, in light of what happened to his own niece when she was a baby girl, but decided to favourite it anyway. That would be horrific.

The second possibility is that his mind simply didn't make any mental connection between the words he was seeing and his own family situation, which would be troubling in a different way.

Because the consistent charge which has been laid against Gerry Adams is that he simply does not "get it" when it comes to sexual abuse, and that he is not sufficiently sensitive to victims and their needs. That he has, what's more, a track record of dealing with them inappropriately.

Adams was furious when Mairia Cahill claimed he told her that some abusers were so manipulative their victims could sometimes "enjoy" it, insisting to RTE News: "I'm a father, I'm a grandfather, I live in the real world. I would never make the remark that is being attributed to me."

But why would a father and grandfather whose own family had been touched by the evil of child abuse be favouriting a tweet which was so inappropriately vulgar? Is that living "in the real world" too?

It's not as if this is an isolated instance of insensitivity. Ms Cahill has highlighted other occasions when Adams has been equally crass in his dealings with victims, recalling not least how Adams sent his niece Aine, on her birthday, a copy of his autobiography which was not only dedicated to her abuser, but which singled him out for praise.

She's highlighted too how, in the very same week that Liam was sentenced for Aine's abuse and Gerry Adams was under fire for what he did and did not do in relation to that matter, the SF leader celebrated his 65th birthday by posting, again on Twitter, a defiant poem which began with the words: "Does my sexiness upset you?/Does it come as a surprise/That I dance like I've got diamonds/ At the meeting of my thighs?"

There have been further examples of his insensitivity in the past two weeks, as the Mairia Cahill scandal gathered pace. Last weekend, after delivering a tub thumping speech to the party faithful in Belfast which effectively threw Mairia to the wolves, Adams went home and tweeted a link to a page from a book by Irish author Michael Harding which spoke fondly of the average man as "a half-evolved Neanderthal with a fragrant penis".

There was nothing wrong with the passage in itself; but context is everything. Why did Adams think it appropriate that night to take a photo of that page on his phone, then link to it on Twitter? Did it never cross his mind how it might look to others?

The week before, Adams also tweeted a poem with the title, My Special Uncle sent to him in "solidarity" by a woman called Minnie Mo. No doubt he felt touched that she sent him this poem, a mawkish piece of sentimental verse found on the internet under many various guises, whilst he was under fire; but did it never occur to him that tweeting a poem which praises "the special kind of love" an uncle can provide might have been somewhat insensitive considering that Mairia Cahill was raped by her aunt's husband, Martin Morris?

These are the sorts of connections anyone who understood the severity of the charges against his party should have made immediately, and amended their behaviour accordingly. That Adams' brain does not appear to make these connections is profoundly worrying as he struggles to convince the public that he is serious about dealing with sexual abuse in a seemly fashion.

His defenders would say that teddy-bear lover Gerry means no harm. That he just doesn't realise what he's saying. That it's all just a big laugh. His critics would surely point out that this is the point.

This is making excuses for him which wouldn't be made for any other politician. Adams is held to an entirely different measure of accountability. That's why he has been able to hide his thoughtless lack of consideration in plain sight for so long, almost taunting his critics with their inability to land a punch.

This is a man who still claims there is no "corporate" way of discovering if the IRA moved sex offenders across the border - even though last year, he facilitated a secret meeting with the IRA for the family of murdered prison officer Brian Stack and even accompanied them in a blacked out van to the location.

Inconsiderate tweets may seem like the least of Gerry Adams's crimes and misdemeanours, but they're all part of the bigger picture.