It will be the first time he has appeared in an English courtroom to answer questions about his alleged role in the IRA and its deadly decades-long bombing campaign.
And Gerry Adams will face serious scrutiny this week over his longstanding denial of membership of the paramilitary terror group after one of Britain’s top prosecutors joined a civil case brought by three survivors of IRA bomb plots in England.
The Daily Mail can reveal that former Director of Public Prosecutions [DPP], Sir Max Hill KC, has joined the legal team of three men suing Mr Adams after they were injured in IRA atrocities between the 1970s and 1990s. The civil trial is due to begin on Monday.
Sir Max, who will cross-examine Mr Adams for the first time in England about his alleged IRA membership, spent five years as DPP, the country’s top public prosecutor and a position formerly held by Sir Keir Starmer.
Prior to that role, he prosecuted a number of high-profile trials including the 2005 London bombings and the murder of Damilola Taylor.
He also spent 18 months as the UK Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation from 2017 to 2018 and prosecuted five Real IRA men for a 2001 bombing campaign in London.
Mr Adams, 77, is being sued for symbolic damages of £1 by John Clark, a victim of the Old Bailey attack in 1973; Jonathan Ganesh, who was injured in the 1996 IRA attack at London’s Docklands and Barry Laycock, who was injured in the attack at Manchester’s Arndale Shopping Centre in the same year.
They allege Mr Adams was ‘directly responsible’ for IRA decisions to place the devices.
Gerry Adams, 77, pictured last year after he won a libel case against the BBC after it broadcast allegations that he had sanctioned the IRA murder of an informant
The former Sinn Fein president (right), at the funeral of IRA volunteer Brendan Davison in 1988. The man on the left is Freddie Scappaticci, who has been outed as the Army spy known as ‘Stakeknife’
The aftermath of the IRA bomb attack on the Old Bailey in London in March 1973. It is one of the IRA atrocities which the three claimants say had the involvement of Mr Adams
Sir Max Hill KC has joined the claimants’ legal team. He served as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2018 and 2023
Mr Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA but has been named as a leader of the group and a member of its ruling Army Council by numerous former members and security service personnel over the last 50 years.
The civil trial at London’s Royal Courts of Justice, will allow the claimants’ legal team to question him about his alleged membership.
The three claimants are expected to call at least 10 witnesses, including former security forces personnel, who are expected to testify that Mr Adams was a leading IRA figure.
In 2019, Mr Adams was quizzed about his IRA within the IRA at an inquest in Northern Ireland into the deaths of 10 people shot dead by soldiers in Ballymurphy, west Belfast, in 1971.
He said: ‘I was not a member of the IRA, I have never disassociated myself with the IRA, and I never will, until the day I die.’
Adams was heavily involved in politics, becoming president of Sinn Fein – widely seen as the political wing of the IRA – in 1983, standing down in 2018.
He also served two terms as the MP for Belfast West, although followed the Sinn Fein policy of abstentionism.
Mr Adams has formerly been represented in legal proceedings by Lord Hermer, who was appointed the Attorney General for England and Wales last year.
He was interned twice as a suspected member of the IRA in the 1970s, but has never been convicted of membership of the banned group.
Matthew Jury, a solicitor representing the claimants, has previously said: ‘Finally after five decades, for the first time Mr Adams will appear in person in an English Court to be cross-examined by the victims of his alleged leadership of the IRA’s terror campaign.’