Gerry Adams wanted to gag the media to stop the public knowing about his paedophile brother, Liam.
Sunday Life can reveal that the Sinn Féin president asked his niece Aine Dahlstrom to help him have the courts ban reporting of her father's horrific sexual abuse.
But Aine, now 40, refused his frantic efforts to prevent the truth emerging about how her father had raped her when she was a child.
She said the Sinn Féin president was always terrified the story of his brother's paedophilia would be revealed in the media.
In 2007, he heard that a local newspaper was planning to cover it. "He frantically phoned me about 20 times.
"He wanted to obtain a court injunction with my help to stop the story. He said he needed to make sure it didn't get into the press to protect me," Aine said.
But she didn't buy the Sinn Féin president's arguments and refused to co-operate. She believed him totally insincere in his claims to care about her. "Looking back, he was buttering me up. It was all about PR and protecting his own image," she said.
After Aine blew the lid on her father's abuse in UTV's explosive 2009 Insight programme, Gerry Adams again told her not to speak to the media: "He advised me against talking to journalists. 'You've no experience dealing with the press,' he said."
Shortly afterwards Aine stopped taking his phone calls and broke off contact with him. Contrary to what the Sinn Féin president portrays, they don't have a warm, loving relationship. Indeed, for years she has had nothing to do with the man whom she refers to as "The Beard".
On Tuesday Liam Adams, 58, was convicted of raping and abusing his daughter over a six-year-period. The abuse began when she was just four years old in 1977 and continued to 1983.
The Sinn Féin president, who gave evidence for the prosecution at the first trial – which was abandoned for legal reasons earlier this year – was not called as a witness this time.
Aine and her mother Sally first reported the abuse to the RUC in January 1987, but withdrew their complaint days later as some officers seemed more interested in using them for information on IRA activity.
In March 1987, Aine and Sally went with Gerry Adams to Buncrana, Donegal, to confront his brother over what he'd done but Liam denied raping Aine.
The former West Belfast MP has said he believed his niece but that he didn't report the abuse to the police himself as Aine had already done so.
In 2000, Liam Adams confessed to his brother that he'd raped Aine. Gerry failed to report this vital information to police for nine years. Indeed, when questioned by detectives about the abuse in 2007 – after Aine had the case reopened – he didn't mention the confession.
It was another two years, when a UTV Insight programme was being made, before Gerry Adams went to police and told them about the confession. This week he refused to explain why he didn't do this until then.
After his brother's conviction this week, Gerry Adams again tried to silence the media and stop questions about his own behaviour by requesting respect and privacy for his niece.
"This has been and continues to be a huge ordeal for my family, especially Aine. If it was your family, you would want space and privacy," he told reporters.
But the cold, calculating relationship he has with his niece and her family in reality emerged in court. While he didn't report his brother's rape confession to police for nine years, he did report Aine's mother to social services for having a "dirty" house and poor "hygiene" with her children.
Sally Campbell was aghast when she heard for the first time what her then MP brother-in-law had done. She told the jury that while she hadn't much money or fancy furniture – and her children like many kids at the time may have picked up nits at school – she had kept a clean and happy home.
Aine revealed that after he learned she'd been abused, far from being a concerned and loving uncle, Gerry Adams never even sent her a birthday or Christmas card.
The only present she ever received from him was a signed copy of his 1996 autobiography, Before The Dawn, in which he singles her father out for thanks and refers positively to "our Liam" 11 times.
"I threw the book in the bin," Aine said. "It made me feel sick. Imagine sending the person abused by your brother a book thanking that brother?"
She said the Sinn Féin president was far from supportive of her: "He put me on a guilt trip. He was always saying how bad Liam felt, how he was suicidal. Did Gerry not realise I was struggling with depression myself."
