Uproar over Gerry Adams' arrest in Northern Ireland shows fragility of peace

BELFAST -- A week after his mother was dragged from his arms and murdered, 11-year-old Michael McConville was himself abducted and warned to keep quiet. Forty-two years later, he says he's never named the Irish Republican Army members who killed his mother because he fears doing so could leave his children without a father.

But one other name associated with the case is now known to the world: Gerry Adams.

When the Sinn Fein leader was arrested April 30 on suspicion of ordering Jean McConville's murder in 1972, the furious reaction and near-breakdown of a critical power-sharing arrangement showed just how vulnerable Northern Ireland remains to its past.

In many places, it would be too late to prosecute a murder case gone cold, four decades after McConville's body was secretly buried on a lonely beach. But in Northern Ireland, where the ghosts of the Troubles still haunt the fragile peace, it may be too soon.

Despite 16 years of relative calm ushered in by the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement, trust between the unionist and republican camps runs thin, with especially little agreement on how to reckon with the legacy of 3,600 deaths over three decades of violence known as the Troubles.

Although Adams was released last Sunday, few doubt where the standoff would have led had he been charged.

"There would have been riots," said Alfie Butler, 58, who lost his niece and her daughter in a 1993 bombing. "It's fine to talk about progress in Northern Ireland. But the paramilitaries haven't gone away. The gangsters are still here, on both sides," he said from a pub on Shankill Road, a unionist stronghold.

Beginning in the late 1960s, a guerrilla war pitted Northern Ireland's Protestant majority and its backers in the British army against the Catholic minority, which sought to secede from the United Kingdom and join Ireland.

To this day, neighborhoods and even individual streets are partitioned, with Union Jacks and Irish tricolors demarcating the boundaries between unionist and republican. Though peace has reigned and Northern Ireland has prospered, there has never been agreement on how to address crimes of the past.

When Adams was arrested, police said they were looking into new evidence from a Boston College oral history project in which former IRA members apparently named Adams in connection with the case.

But Sinn Fein senior leader Martin McGuinness charged "a cabal" within the police force had "a negative and destructive agenda to both the peace process and to Sinn Fein."

McGuinness suggested his party would end support for the police and launch protests if charges against Adams went forward. Although the group has disavowed violence, the prospect set Belfast on edge.

In an interview, Peter Robinson, the unionist leader of the Northern Ireland assembly, said Sinn Fein's message was unmistakable: "Unless the police backed away from charging Mr. Adams, Sinn Fein would bring the house down on us all."

In the end, Adams wasn't charged. The evening after he was freed, Sinn Fein gave him a rapturous welcome back, with 700 activists packing a Belfast ballroom to cheer his return.

For Michael McConville, the prospect of winning justice for his mother feels remote.

Now 52, he vividly remembers the night in 1972 when 10 IRA members burst into his family's home and dragged his mother away as her children screamed.

The IRA has said it suspected Jean McConville, who was 38, of being an informant for the British, although a later investigation turned up no evidence.

Michael McConville said he recognized many of his mother's abductors -- and has seen them around town in the years since. But he never revealed the names, fearing the consequences for his family if he does.

"I know the hurt and the pain that I've gone through, and I wouldn't want that for anyone else," he said.