Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern went further, accusing Adams and his deputy, Martin McGuinness, of being on the IRA's army council. He insisted that they must have known about the heist plan even while negotiating with the British and Irish governments.
Damaging as the bank robbery was to Sinn Fein's image, worse was yet to come.
Magennis's Bar is a dark-paneled, old-fashioned pub next to the Victorian-era St. George's Market in central Belfast. A few streets from City Hall, it sits on the edge of the Markets, a part of town known for Catholic nationalism. According to one resident who requested anonymity, the bar had become a hangout for IRA toughs, who were said to provide its security.
On the night of Jan. 30, after a commemoration in Derry for the victims of 1972's Bloody Sunday, some IRA men were drinking in the bar. So was McCartney, with his friend Brendan Devine.
According to family members, McCartney and Devine got into an argument with a leading IRA member, reportedly about a remark made to a woman in the bar. Despite offering an apology, McCartney and Devine were hauled out to the street. There, on the dark pavement, someone produced a knife from the bar's kitchen, sliced McCartney open, gouged his eyes and left him for dead. Devine, beaten with an iron bar and stabbed, survived.
Associates of the killer went back in the bar, cleaned up physical evidence, took the tape from the bar's security camera and instructed the patrons to keep silent because it was "IRA business," McCartney's family said.
That might have been the end of it. Like so many acts of violence in Belfast, where armed paramilitaries on both sides carry out "punishment" attacks in their own communities, police would normally add the killing to their files of unsolved cases.
In McCartney's case, his sisters were having none of it. Paula, Gemma, Donna, Catherine and Claire say 70 people were in the bar that night, and threats by the IRA are preventing witnesses from telling what they saw.
The accusations have roiled Short Strand, on the other side of the Lagan River from Magennis's.
Alex Maskey, the Sinn Fein city councilor for the area that includes the pub, is defiant. A scrappy former amateur boxer wounded by a unionist bullet in 1987, he said the accusations were unproved and exploitive, and that the IRA and Sinn Fein had been working hard to cope with a situation "not of their making."
