North Facing

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My back was turned when in walked Gerry Adams. I was laying out my tools in a temporary studio on the Falls Road. Smiling behind that famous beard, the former president of Sinn Féin was at ease here in the heartland of working-class Catholic Belfast. Standing tall, he carried himself like a man in his early sixties rather than his mid-seventies. The Daily Mail called him one of Ireland’s ‘most feared men’. Nelson Mandela called him an ‘ally’. I wondered how we’d get on; mostly, I worried how I’d get on. Once my hands touch clay, my academic training kicks in – but I’m wound tight until the whistle blows.

Although I was anxious to begin, he suggested coffee and cakes. He soon returned with a tray of goodies. As I bit into a pastry – a Northern Irish delicacy he described as a ‘Flies’ graveyard’, he casually asked why I wanted to sculpt him. I nearly coughed up my flies. With a sinking feeling, I remembered Alastair Campbell described Adams as ‘a compulsive negotiator’. This was agreed, wasn’t it? In three-hour sessions over a few days, I’d block in the portrait in clay.

It had been my suggestion, this portrait. ‘Warts and all’ was how I described it months before. Initially, he was sceptical. Wary even. What convinced him, I suspect, was my frank admission that I cared for no Irish political party, including his. Whatever you may say about Adams, anyone who heard his eulogy for his friend Shane Macgowan of the Pogues knows his sympathy for artists is genuine.

Yes, success has many fathers but Adams’ omission from so many official commemorations increasingly struck me as unjust and unwise.

It helped too that I proposed it in 2023, the 25th anniversary of Ireland’s peace. Something seemed off to me about the build-up. Everyone else involved in the Good Friday Agreement was lauded. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, the leaders of America, Britain and Ireland at the time, drag around tarnished legacies today but can boast of their part in making peace. And boast they did, in interview after interview. Supporting actors too enjoyed the limelight. Bronze busts were unveiled of John Hume in the European Parliament and of Senator George Mitchell in Belfast’s Queens University where Hilary Clinton was chancellor.

Yes, success has many fathers but Adams’ omission from so many official commemorations increasingly struck me as unjust and unwise. Unlike previous negotiations, Good Friday held in large part because of the participation of hardliners. The excuse for the double standard is the shadow of the gunman that has stalked Irish politics as long as Irish politics has existed. The more prosaic reason is that Sinn Féin, the party he led for 35 years, are closer than ever to taking power south of the Irish border, a changing of the guard dreaded by the Dublin and Westminster establishment. If and when it happens, Irish unification becomes an imminent inevitability but by then the generation that began and ended the Troubles will mostly be gone. I told Adams frankly that I wanted to sculpt him while he was ‘on this side of Eternity’.

It was very hush hush. After a brief phone call, arrangements were made via a Sinn Féin handler. From Dublin I caught the Belfast train, heaving my suitcase into the overhead. It was packed with clay, armature wire and other suspicious looking articles that I wouldn’t care to explain to a PSNI officer. Across the aisle, a boozy journalist was trying to impress a couple of southern day trippers with hair-raising anecdotes about covering the Troubles. I kept my head down, lips sealed. Say nothing and all that.

And after all that persuasion, and preparation, here I was, faced with the prospect of returning home in ignominy if I failed this last test.

With a sudden inspiration, I described an exhibition of presidential portraits I saw years ago in Washington DC. While the crowds mobbed Nixon, Lincoln and Kennedy, I was transfixed by Anders Zorn’s portrait of Howard Taft. The president between Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson has become an obscure and faintly ridiculous figure, remembered mainly for getting stuck in the White House bathtub. Zorn’s portrait shows what contemporaries saw in 1911: a substantial gentleman of shrewd intelligence, sober judgement. It commands respect. Later, reading of Taft’s career, I learned that he is the only man who was both chief justice and president, and that he greatly preferred the purity of law to the cattle trading of politics. Humanity, not flattery, is the point of portraiture. Capture that, I told Adams, and the viewer is compelled to sympathise, whatever their preconceptions. ‘Grand,’ he said. Either I passed the audition or he was just trying to get my measure. Moments later I was taking his measure, with callipers.

I don’t suppose one who has been shadowed by spies and hunted by soldiers is truly knowable, but I believe I captured a sense of the man.

To save time, I’d prepared a life-size clay skull. As I sculpted, we chatted about art, history and even Star Trek – in one episode, the android Data tells Captain Picard that Irish reunification occurred in 2024. ‘Not much time left,’ I teased. Adams remarked drily that the BBC banned that episode.

I don’t suppose one who has been shadowed by spies and hunted by soldiers is truly knowable, but I believe I captured a sense of the man, enough at least to imbue that physicality into the portrait I finished in the following months. Last year I presented him with a copy. As thanks, he gave me a tour of Leinster House, the parliament in Dublin where he was a representative from 2011 to 2020. In the Dáil chamber, we admired busts of Micheal Collins and Eamon De Valera – men called terrorists by the British leaders with whom they negotiated.

Whether my portrait ever joins that pantheon, Adams probably won’t live to see it. In the meantime, finding Irish institutions willing to exhibit it has been… challenging. For the same reasons Adams was the uninvited guest at the Good Friday banquet, his humanity is something many are motivated to deny. We prefer our monsters monstrous. But in April the Irish public got their first chance to see beyond the caricature in The Kilkenny Portrait Show. The sky, as far as I could tell, didn’t fall.

Tough times inspire great art; wars are especially productive. Think of the poems of the Great War, the novels of WWII and Vietnam’s conspicuously literary journalism. Northen Ireland’s thirty years of mayhem killed 3500, half of them civilians – a unique conflagration in post-war Western Europe. That its cultural influence is equally vast is only to be expected. Harder to understand is why so little of that art comes from southern Ireland.

Perhaps our reticence is rooted in compassion? Horrors can strike us dumb. ‘If the Famine stirred some to angry rhetoric,’ the critic Terry Eagleton said, ‘it would seem to have traumatised others into muteness.’ The novelist Colm Tóibín rejects this pat explanation. He explains the silence of Yeats, Joyce and their acolytes as a matter of taste. The Famine is too big, too terrible. ‘The main thing to do,’ Tóibín advises, ‘is not mention it, don’t evoke it because it’s just too cheap.’ The Troubles may be a similar monster, best attacked obliquely.

It’s an attractive idea. It’s also, concerning the Troubles at least, complete nonsense. In contemporary Irish art, the Troubles is not an implicit theme. It is a theme conspicuous in its absence. And this is by design. When the north caught fire in 1968, the south adopted a prudent non-interference policy. As fellow Catholics were insulted, prosecuted, beaten, interned and executed, we looked on passively. When we could bear no more, we looked away. This denial was initially reinforced by censorship. RTÉ, the Irish state broadcaster, was committed to reporting the Troubles truthfully and would often interview combatants, up to and including the IRA chief of staff. The Dublin government forbade what they considered seditious propaganda. When RTÉ defied the order, the minister in charge sacked the broadcaster’s board. One reporter was jailed for not revealing sources. Others were threatened. In 1974, after the murder of a fellow politician, the new minister Conor Cruise O’Brien condemned Sinn Féin as ‘the civilian front of a political murder-gang’. The party was banned from the airways until 1994.

The gag was not officially removed until 1994, by which time it was unnecessary, a taboo having been inculcated by the press and the intelligentsia. The Ireland I grew up in the 1980s stopped at the border. A bomb in Belfast was no more my business than a bomb in Beirut. Into the 1990s, I noticed how many of my compatriots were vexed even by the mention of the north. Its atavistic sectarianism, its dysfunctional government, its ethnic voting – it was the antithesis of Ireland’s burgeoning self-image as a dynamic secular neoliberal outpost.

For the denizens of a remote Atlantic island, geopolitics easily becomes a backdrop for cost-free moralism.

Predictably, this attempt to banish our national Jungian shadow generated absurdities that linger today. The Milkman by Anna Burns could not have been published in Ireland. It was left to Faber & Faber to release this deserving winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Although Ex-IRA enforcers are reliable stock villains in crime potboilers, Irish letters has scant interest in the Troubles. Similarly, the Irish Film Board refused to fund Hunger, Steve McQueen’s Caméra d’Or-winning film about the death of Bobby Sands. Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls, made almost entirely with first-rate Irish actors, was broadcast and produced in the UK.

Even as this domestic blindness impoverishes our culture, it inspires displacement activities that distort our politics. The weirdest is our intelligentsia’s obsession with every land other than Northen Ireland. For the denizens of a remote Atlantic island, geopolitics easily becomes a backdrop for cost-free moralism. Rarely is an interest in foreign affairs coupled with much study of history. Naturally, a favourite target of ritual denunciation is Israel. Sally Rooney, who writes stories about the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie in the approved manner, who proudly describes herself a ‘communist’ and has no qualms about her novels being translated into Chinese, is a poster girl of this self-regarding class of puritans.

This bizarre and petty activity is, of course, another symptom of a century’s dislocation. When the two Irelands finally find each other, we will no doubt be confronted by enough problems that we need never again go abroad seeking dragons to slay.

Whether Adams lives to see that day, he will have made it possible. That he survived the process was never a given. From Gandhi to Yitzhak Rabin, history is littered with leaders slain by their own side for making peace.

I harbour no illusions. Beyond the story that weathered face tells, Gerry Adams is a man with secrets. I learned none, but there’s one story I tell people who ask what it was like. It was the moment that reminded me that the Troubles were a generational disaster that spared no one – neither civilians, soldiers, nor their commanders.

It’s normal for artists’ models to drift out of the pose and, towards a session’s end, I noticed Adams tilting. Somewhat abruptly, I told him to sit up straight. ‘Oh aye, sorry,’ he apologised, ‘that shoulder sags a little when I get tired. That’s the one they shot me in.’ I hadn’t heard that excuse before.

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Image: Gerry Adams at the Fermanagh Commemoration, 2001. Flickr user Miss Fitz, permission CC-BY.

Aidan Harte is an Irish sculptor based in Kildare. He is the author of four books.

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