In 1984, when the Provisional IRA needed someone to hide Liam Adams, they turned to a priest in New York for help. The approach to Father Patrick Moloney came not long after his first brush with the law. He remembers it was 1984 because it was the year he was acquitted of gun-running charges.
The approach to Father Moloney came from Belfast Provos, and Gerry Adams played no direct role in finding a bolthole for his brother. That was not surprising, since the priest distrusted the Sinn Féin leader's politics; he would probably have given him short shrift. But he was ready to help. It was clear Liam was in trouble, although Moloney did not know why.
Liam Adams's marriage to Sally Corrigan effectively ended in 1982 and he had taken up with another girl, Bronagh, who joined him in his New York hideout for a while and later married him in Dundalk. A picture of a smiling Gerry Adams at their wedding reception would eventually blow a hole in the Sinn Féin leader's cover story that he and Liam had been estranged since 1987.
"My understanding at the time was that they wanted him out of circulation," said Moloney. "Gerry had no contact with me. It was other Belfast people, from the republican movement. [Liam] had been paraded around from pillar to post until he came to me. He was just a loose wire in some ways, and they were also a little bit afraid of him. How shall I put this? He was a weak link in the chain. I don't think they trusted him."
In the tangled and disconcerting story of Liam Adams, one feature provides an uncomfortable parallel between his alleged paedophilia and the scandal of Catholic clerical abuse, as highlighted in last November's Murphy report. That was the practice of moving alleged abusers around Ireland to avoid the demands for action once their activities became known.
Liam Adams made at least six moves within and outside Ireland from the time that he ceased allegedly abusing his daughter Áine until the scandal broke. It is these moves, with Gerry Adams's perceived reluctance to take decisive action against his brother, that led some to conclude that there had been a cover-up.
The New York episode, which has not come to light until now, shows powerful figures in the Provisional movement wanted Liam out of Ireland after his marriage collapsed. So in 1984 arrangements were made for him to be smuggled to America, given a false identity, and looked after until it was safe for him to return.
He stayed in New York for eight months, presumably until the reason for his exile ceased to be a problem.
IN 1961, in the East Village area of Manhattan, Patrick Moloney from Limerick (no relation to this writer) opened a house for troubled teenage boys. "The neediest street children," he called them. Many were runaways lured to the bright lights ofNew York; undocumented aliens who otherwise would face deportation.
Sixteen years later, drawn by what he told The New York Times was its "family spirit", Moloney was ordained a priest in the Melkite church, an early Byzantine offshoot still faithful to Rome. His mission to help the city's teenagers now came under the aegis of the Melkite community.
Since then, Bonitas House at 606 East 9th Street has been a refuge for hundreds of such unfortunates, where Moloney's tries to feed, clothe and house them.
But ministering to homeless youngsters was only one of his acts of charity. During the worst years of the Troubles, Bonitas House also became a port of call for indigent IRA men, refugees on the run from the authorities back home, or who wanted a break from Belfast or Derry and were in need of a fresh identity and a start in New York away from the prying eyes of the FBI.
For Moloney, this was a natural extension of his republican views and background. When the Troubles erupted, he had gravitated towards support groups that sprang up in New York. In later years, he said the prayers at fundraising events organised by the largest pro-Provo group, Irish Northern Aid, and he had what can only be described as a colourful association with the sharper end of the IRA. That led to more than one brush with the law.
In 1982, Moloney, his brother John and a well-known Belfast Provo known as "Flash" McVeigh were arrested in Ireland and charged with running guns for the IRA. The operation was discovered when a crate of weapons split open at Shannon airport. Moloney was acquitted and returned to America, but his brother was convicted and spent three-and-a-half years in Portlaoise prison.
The priest regularly supplied fresh names and social-security numbers for republican emigrés. Among those he helped was Sammy Millar, an IRA man from Ardoyne, a former internee and convicted bomber who in 1993 robbed the Brinks armoured-car depot in Rochester, in upstate New York, of $7.4m. It was the fifth-largest heist in American history at the time. It was speculated that the IRA had played a role, but never established.
Eleven months later, Millar was arrested in a Manhattan apartment sub-let by Moloney with $2m in cash and a moneycounting machine. Neither man was convicted of robbery but merely for handling stolen cash. Millar got five years, the priest four. As he awaited trial, Moloney, then 62, wore an electronic bracelet on his ankle so the FBI could track his movements.
Millar was later deported back to Belfast and he wrote a book about the robbery, On the Brinks. Moloney, a US citizen, returned to the East Village and to his support work for homeless teenagers and IRA exiles.
Now 78 and still working in the East Village, he recalls his first meeting with Liam Adams more than 25 years ago, and how he warned him to assume an entirely different personality. "'You will not in any way let anyone know who you are, what your family background is or anything else', I instructed him. I wanted him to be entirely anonymous. I had a couple of other Belfast boys here and I told him, 'Liam, if I give you instructions in a certain area I have no time to explain everything to you but I need it to be followed to the letter'."
First, he dressed them in American clothing. Then he asked the Belfast brigade to hand over any medications, such as Aspirin, with European brand names.
Adams was warned not to use his own name. Instead, Moloney christened him John Burns. "You'll be Mr and Mrs Burns," the priest told Adams and his girlfriend. "And I told them, 'Liam, I am a very hard taskmaster'. We were under constant surveillance from you-know-who, so we needed to be low-key. I had housed quite a few down the years and some of them were so damned indiscreet; incredibly, absurdly indiscreet."
Among the fugitive Provos who went through Moloney's shelter were Nessan Quinlivan, the IRA activist who shot his way out of Brixton prison in London in 1991 alongside Pearse McAuley. There was also Liam Ryan, a former American commander of the IRA who was shot dead by the UVF in Co Tyrone in 1989.
Moloney believed he had to take special care with Liam Adams. It did not seem like he had entered America legally, and he also appeared to be on the run. The Belfast Provos had made it clear they needed him out of the way for a while . It reminded Moloney of the Seamus Gildernew case. The Tyrone republican jumped bail and fled Ireland after guns were found on his farm in Co Monaghan. "He was a weak link in the chain and had to be out of circulation," the priest said. "He couldn't be trusted and I believed that was the question with Liam. They were just afraid that Liam was not reliable."
Moloney assumed it was IRA business that had caused Liam Adams to be sent out of Ireland. Supporting this theory was the buckshot lodged in Adams's head. Moloney got him private medical treatment to remove it. But as they got to know each other, Adams spoke freely about his troubled marriage to Corrigan, claiming he had been forced into it by his family and when he tried to get a divorce, Gerry was said to have blocked it. The priest says Liam told him that he got married as a teenager, followed an unplanned pregnancy, and that he had been pressured into it.
These circumstances might explain subsequent events. Adams is alleged to have beaten his wife and afterwards raped their daughter Áine, according to testimony the two women gave to Ulster Television. Is it possible that he was taking his frustration out on the pair he blamed for his unhappy life, the woman who got pregnant and the child who was born as a result?
When he was staying in Bonitas House, Adams had a new woman in his life. "He was with Bronagh, who is his present wife," Moloney said. "Bronagh came from a nice family outside of Belfast; her father was a chemist. They met when she was a volunteer social worker in the Falls. He was a fragile young man, a nice fellow, he really was. And Bronagh was, how shall I put it, a marriage outside of his class. She was upper middle class, from a Belfast suburban family, fascinated by the [republican] cause."
Adams wanted to end the marriage to Corrigan so he could marry Bronagh, but claimed that his family, and especially Gerry, stood in the way.
"He said he got no help from Gerry, [who] was strongly opposed [to a divorce] at the time, there's no doubt about that. They were not on the friendliest of terms. Liam said, 'Look, he should mind his own business'. Gerry was concerned about the integrity of the family, that sort of stuff," said Moloney. "He saw Gerry as a political climber who didn't want to sacrifice the good name of the family. When Liam came to me, he had a tremendous amount of resentment towards Gerry and he told me a lot of not very complimentary things about his brother."
The priest's advice to Liam was to put his foot down and tell Gerry he was going through with the separation. Eventually, Liam appears to have secured both a divorce and a church annulment, granted on the basis of his relative youth when he got married. Moloney worked on the paperwork, showing Liam how he was eligible under church rules to have his marriage dissolved.
"It was an open-and-shut case," he recalled. "I presented it to a tribunal and a boardwho said 'yes' but the rest of it would have to be proceeded from over there [Ireland] and I know that later on he married Bronagh."
Gerry Adams's opposition to Liam's divorce plans raises an interesting question about his subsequent handling of the sex-abuse scandal, given the allegations that he did little to bring his brother to book.
If he really did try to block Liam's divorce because of the embarrassment it would have caused him and his family, doesn't that suggest the Sinn Féin leader would have been even more opposed to seeing the gory details of alleged incest and paedophilia become public?
Liam and Bronagh stayed with Moloney in the East Village for four months and later moved to Connecticut to stay with friends of the priest. They ended up at a farm run by the Melkites in upstate New York. Moloney believes Liam moved to Ireland, initially to Dundalk, in early 1985, eight months after they had arrived.
Whatever problem had sent Liam Adams to America had apparently been resolved. Two years later, Áine, his daughter, brought the first complaint of sexual abuse against him to the RUC.
Moloney helped Adams get a divorce.
