#Marian Gerry Adams and straining relations with the truth

I’d rather we were ruled by intelligent liars than sincere fools.

Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling

Politicians have to lie, be hypocritical and change their minds. If they didn't ever, there'd be no such thing as a political party. Nor could they rise to meet the changing aspirations of any democratic society. Chris admits four general circumstances in which it might be okay for a politician to lie:

1. To preserve stability 
2. To fob off silly speculation 
3. To promote decent policies in the face of an ignorant or prejudiced electorate 
4. To project strength 

By and large, he's not talking about thumping great whoppers, but the trade off between truthfulness and utility. This is one of the functions of Plato's noble lie. A little closer to home, Jude Collins has some useful thoughts on the matter too:

Strictly speaking, lies are woven into the fabric of all our lives. Lies can be told to impress the electorate, lies can be told to save lives, lies can be told to protect yourself from prosecution. Not to mention a kick in the teeth should you say “Yes, your bum does look big in that. Enormous, in fact”. 

Yet at the start of the presidential election of the autumn of 2011, I wrote a piece on the journalist's problem thrown up by of partial or limited disclosure from politicians. At the time I quoted this extraordinary outburst from Gay Byrne, who was speaking in relation to Sinn Fein:

“I’ve interviewed Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams and they are so well disciplined and so well honed that no interviewer gets anywhere with them. “You get nowhere with them because they lie. They lie all the time. They don’t mind lying and they’ve rehearsed their lies and they’ve been trained to lie, and that’s what they’re doing.”

Well, Gay may not have made headway with either man, but on Saturday Marian Finucane did; if only by highlighting why purveying version of the truth that's almost impossible to believe is a problem.

The whole thing is worth listening to, but for me this part was the most revealing:

 

Marian recapitulates the story of Sinn Fein's changing truth over Garda McCabe as "a lie followed by a lie followed by an adaptation of a lie." No contradictions from Gerry, apparently...

Later Gerry drops something of a clanger when he admits (for the first time, apparently) that he did not pay for the US treatment of his prostate problem, but that it was paid for him by a wealthy US friend called Bill Flynn (or a 'dig out' as one wit on Twitter put it).

That's a truth which Ireland's Revenue Commissioners - not to mention SIPO - may want to hear a little more about.

More trivially Mr Adams goes on to repeat the false claim that he made on This Week a fortnight ago that it was he who had the Government of Ireland Act removed from British statute. We must assume that this whopper is now party policy since it's the very first thing Pearse Doherty says on TWIP today (27.28 in).

The problem is not so much the 'lie' itself, since we should admit that not only is politics not a moral trade, for the most part we prefer them to make smart decisions rather than purely moral ones.

Rather it is that, oftentimes in the case of some of Sinn Fein's politicians-with-a-past, it's so easily falsifiable. The noble lie only has a proper social function when it's plausible.