The late Fr Gerry Reynolds, who played an influential role in persuading the IRA to call its ceasefire, defended Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’s denial of membership of the IRA on mental reservation grounds.
Fr Reynolds, who died on November 30th last, played a critical role, along with the late Fr Alec Reid, in hosting the first meeting between Mr Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume at Clonard monastery in Belfast in 1988.
Those talks ended without agreement in September 1988, but resumed in 1993, leading to the December 1993 joint declaration by then taoiseach Albert Reynolds and then British prime minister John Major.
In an interview shortly before his death, the Limerick-born Redemptorist took the line that it was nobody’s business whether Mr Adams was in the IRA or not. It was “a legitimate mental reservation”, he said.
Told by journalist Martin O’Brien that some would claim Mr Adams was lying, he replied: “He’s entitled to that mental reservation, that he is not going to tell people that he doesn’t believe have any right to know.”
Asking Mr Adams whether he was a member of the IRA or not was “such a stupid question” because the IRA was “a secret society, and the raison d’etre of the secret society is that it is secret”.
The Murphy inquiry into clerical child sex abuse in Dublin said the Catholic Church’s concept of mental reservation allowed churchmen to knowingly mislead people without being guilty of lying.
The then archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, said: “Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression . . .”
