Former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams says a claim by U2 frontman Bono that he and wife Ali were IRA targets was “news to me and to anyone else close to republican thinking”.
The former politician, who has denied ever being in the IRA, expressed bemusement at the claims in the singer’s book that they were under threat over his opposition to the IRA.
“I understand from press reports that he says his wife Ali and he were targets for the IRA. That’s news to me and I’m sure to anyone else close to republican thinking back in the day,” Mr Adams wrote in the Andersonstown News, the west Belfast news outlet.
Bono reveals in his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, to be published on November 1st that he has received death threats during his career from the IRA, Dublin gangsters and the American far right.
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In the book, the U2 singer says he feared for the safety of his family after republicans stoked anger against the band’s pro-peace stance during the conflict in Northern Ireland.
He recalled Mr Adams saying in an interview that the singer “stinks” after it was perceived “U2′s opposition to paramilitaries of all kinds had cost the IRA valuable funding from the US”.
Bono writes that this was “a vexed signal” to IRA sympathisers “to kick U2 off their national perch” and that he was later advised by police to increase security around him and his wife after the kidnapping of Dublin dentist John O’Grady in 1987.
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The singer says in the book that he was advised by Garda Special Branch detectives that his wife Ali was the more likely target of republican threats.
“I still take that badly for all kinds of reasons,” he writes.
Bono read from the passages in the book about the threats during an appearance at Cheltenham Literature Festival earlier this month. The reading was widely reported in the media.
In response, Mr Adams denied that the claim that he disliked the U2 lead singer.
“Bono is quoted in some news reports claiming that I hate him. Nope, Paul, not me,” he said, referring to the singer’s real name, Paul Hewson. “You must be mixing me up with someone else. I don’t hate anyone. It’s a wasted negative emotion.”
In his column for the Andersonstown News, the former Sinn Féin president took issue with some of Bono’s past remarks about the Troubles.
“Some of your commentary on the conflict here was shrill, ill-informed and unhelpful,” he writes.
“However, you weren’t on your own. You echoed the Irish establishment line. It was the wrong line for decades. A failure of governance and the abandonment of responsibility to lead a process of peace and justice. Thankfully that changed. But it took a long time.
“Despite this some of us got through it all. With or without you,” he wrote, in a reference to one of U2′s best known songs.
