Sinn Féin president says people offended by tweet about Django Unchained had either misunderstood or misrepresented it

Sinn Féin’s president, Gerry Adams, has apologised for using the N-word in a tweet while watching Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s film about racism and slavery in America.



Adams later deleted the tweet but one of the few black Irish republicans from the Sinn Féin leader’s west Belfast base also criticised his comparison with nationalists in Northern Ireland to the plight of black American slaves.



A frequent user of Twitter, Adams tweeted on Sunday night: “Watching Django Unchained-A Ballymurphy Nigger!”



The use of the word has provoked a storm of controversy in Ireland and beyond but Adams initially insisted he was using the word ironically.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday at Sinn Féin’s Connolly House headquarters in his native west Belfast, Adams said: “I have acknowledged that the use of the N-word was inappropriate. That is why I deleted the tweet. I apologise for any offence caused.”

He said any attempt to accuse him of racism “lacked credibility”. In his long career at the top of Sinn Féin, Adams has been welcomed by black political leaders from Jesse Jackson in the United States to Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

Adams defended his attempt to compare the situation of Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland with African American history.

He said: “I stand over the context and main point of my tweet, which were the parallels between people in struggle. Like African Americans, Irish nationalists were denied basic rights. I have long been inspired by Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who stood up for themselves and for justice.”

Writer Tim Brannigan, one of the few black Irish republican prisoners to be held in the Maze prison, said he was shocked Adams had used the word.



“Gerry and Sinn Féin won’t need me to tell them just how toxic it is and the sort of reactions it gets. I don’t think that you can equate what was happening in Belfast in 1965 with slavery,” Brannigan said.

Alex Attwood, SDLP candidate for Belfast West and former Stormont minister, said the tweet demonstrated a “staggering deficiency in judgment” by the Sinn Féin president.

“For years now Sinn Féin have embarrassingly tried to portray Gerry Adams as some kind of international icon. It was only in March that Gerry Adams was comparing himself to Rosa Parks. If a similar remark had been made by any other political leader on this island, Sinn Féin would have unleashed an orchestrated wave of angry condemnation. They would not accept any talk of context or of irony. They should hold themselves to the same standard,” Attwood said.

During the Troubles Irish republicans including Adams associated themselves with the struggle for black liberation not only in the United States but in post-colonial states particularly in Africa. The IRA and Sinn Féin maintained strong links with the African National Congress and one of the ANC’s leaders became part of the team that oversaw the decommissioning of most of the Provisionals’ arsenal in the early 2000s.



Sinn Féin activists have also been involved in grassroots anti-racist campaigns in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Martin McGuinness as deputy first minister in the north of Ireland paid a personal visit to a group of Roma families who were subjected to a campaign of racist violence in south Belfast just under a decade ago.



The party, alongside other more militant republicans, however, continues to revere one of the most controversial figures in 19th century Irish republicanism, John Mitchel.

The Newry-born Fenian fled Ireland to the US where he became a slave owner and active backer of the Confederate cause. Even after the Confederacy was defeated in the American civil war Mitchel continued to argue for the reintroduction of the African slave trade.