Gerry Adams: still a revolting man and still trying to steal Irish history.

I know this is not exactly breaking news but Gerry Adams is a vile man. Since no-one devotes much attention to Northern Ireland these days it is easy to forget this. Easy to file Adams and his Sinn Fein comrades into a musty drawer marked Ancient History. But the past is not another country.

In Dublin this week the Smithwick Tribunal’s report into alleged Garda collusion with the IRA in the murders of RUC officers Harry Breen and Robert Buchanan in 1989 was finally published.

The report confirmed long-held suspicions that the IRA had a mole or, less dramatically, a simple informant inside the Garda station in Dundalk, County Louth. The two policemen were murdered minutes after leaving a meeting with their Garda counterparts in Dundalk at which cross-border co-operation to combat IRA smuggling was the chief topic of discussion.

Just another squalid shooting in a squalid little war, you may say, and you would have a point.