Gerry Adams

Gerry Adams, MP, MLA, (born 6 October, 1948) is an Irish Republican politician and abstentionist Westminster Member of Parliament for West Belfast. He is President of Sinn Féin, which became the largest nationalist or republican political party in Northern Ireland in the 2005 British general election.

Adams was generally seen as a spokesman for the Provisional republican movement, which encompassed Sinn Féin and the paramilitary Provisional IRA, an illegal organisation in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The latter killed some 1,700 people during the "Troubles" [1].

Senior political, security and media figures, including the Minister for Justice in the Republic of Ireland assert that, from the 1970s that until mid-2005, Adams was a member of the Provisional IRA's governing army council [2], [3]. He has also been accused of being the IRA commander in Belfast during the 1970s. Adams has denied that he has ever been a member of the IRA, although many leading Unionist figures believe he has been.

From the late 1980s, Adams was an important figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, initially following contact by the then SDLP leader John Hume and subsequently with the Irish and British governments and then other parties. In 2005, the Provisional IRA indicated that its "war" was over and that the republican movement is now exclusively committed to democratic politics. Under Adams, Sinn Féin changed its traditional policy of abstentionism and moved to take seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

For three years, it participated in the power-sharing executive committee (cabinet) in Northern Ireland, where it shared powers with the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP. (The Democratic Unionist Party appointed two ministers but did not sit in the committee in protest at the presence of Sinn Féin.)

Background

He was born Gerard Adams, Jr. in West Belfast into a strongly activist and nationalist Catholic family, consisting of 10 children who survived infancy, 5 boys, 5 girls and their parents, Gerry Adams Sr. and Annie Hannaway.

Gerry Sr. and Annie came from strong republican backgrounds. Adams's grandfather, also Gerry Adams, had being a member of the IRB during the Anglo-Irish War. Two of Adams's uncles, Dominic and Patrick Adams, had being interned by the governments in Belfast and Dublin; Dominic had prior to 1939 being Chief of Staff of the IRA. Gerry Sr. joined the IRA aged sixteen; in 1942 he participated in an IRA ambush on a RUC patrol but was himself shot, arrested and sentenced to eight years imprisonment.

Adams's maternal great-grandfather, Michael Hannaway, was a member of the Fenians during their dynamiting campaign in England in the 1860s and 1870s. Michael's son, Billy, was election agent for Eamon de Valera in 1918 in West Belfast but refused to follow deV into democratic and constitutional politics upon the formation of Fianna Fail. Annie Hannaway was a member of Cumann na mBan, the women's branch of the IRA. Three of her brothers (Alfie, Liam and Tommy) were known IRA "hardmen".

Yet as a result of the IRA being outlawed north and south of the border, and the many difficulties faced by its members - trouble finding work, lenthy terms in jail, lack of support among the larger Irish community - hardcore republicans were isolated and shunned even with their own community: "West Belfast republicanism was dominatited by three families: the Adamses, the Hannaways, and the Burnses. They were all intermarried, the consequence of the imprisionment of their male members. When figures like Gerry Adams sr. emerged after having served their jail terms, they found girls of a marriageable age either already spoken for or reluctant to marry into the IRA. Inevitably they drifted into relationships with the sisters of their IRA comrades ... The IRA in places like West Belfast ... grew heavily dependent on a small, often interrelated network of extended families ... the result was that republican involvement tended to be an inherited rather than acquired activity ...[Adams's parents] would pass on to their children their political views as well as a special, exclusive sense of shared suffering".

Adams attended St Finian's Primary School on the Falls Road where he was taught by the De La Salle Brothers. He then attended St Mary's Christian Brothers Grammar School. He left St. Mary's at the age of 17, and became a bartender, but became increasingly involved in the Irish republican movement, joining Sinn Féin and Fianna Éireann in 1964.

Adams has stated repeatedly that he has never been a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), but some British and Irish state papers released under the "thirty year rule" named him as a senior IRA figure in the early 1970s.

Sean O'Callaghan, a former IRA member and Garda and MI5 informer from County Kerry, has also said he spoke to Adams at IRA meetings in the 1980s. It is believed that Adams began this so-called Dissembling Tactic in the very early 1980's was a result of Sinn Fein's contesting of elections both in Northern Ireland and Ireland. Sinn Fein candidates who were members of the IRA would have to deny membership - even people such as Adams and Martin McGuinness who spoke for the IRA in talks with the British - or face chages of IRA membership and imprisionment. This was solved by allowing IRA members of Sinn Fein to deny any and all such involvement, a practise which Adams continues to this day.

Early Republican Career

Following the introduction of internment without trial in 1971 under the Special Powers Act, Adams was interned in 1972 but released in November, after the IRA made his inclusion on their negotiation team a condition of taking part in ceasefire talks with the British government. After the ceasefire ended, he was again arrested in July 1973 and interned at Long Kesh (Maze) internment camp. After taking part in an IRA-organised escape attempt he was sentenced to a period of imprisonment, which was also served at the Maze. He was charged with IRA membership in 1978 but, after being remanded on custody for seven months, was released for lack of evidence.

In 1983, he became the first Sinn Féin MP elected to the British House of Commons since 1918. Following his election (as MP for West Belfast) the British government lifted a ban on him travelling to Britain. In line with Sinn Féin policy, he refused to sit in the House of Commons.

On 14 March, 1984, Adams was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt when several UFF gunmen fired about twenty shots into the car in which he was travelling. He claimed that the British army had prior knowledge of the attack and allowed it to go ahead.

Adams' nickname in the Republican Movement is 'Brownie', which was also his pen name when he contributed to the newspaper Republican News in the 1970s. Only close associates now refer to him in this way. Adams is admired and respected in the party, but has never enjoyed the same popularity among rank and file members as figures such as Martin Ferris or Martin McGuinness, seen by members as more approachable.

President of Sinn Féin

In 1978, he became vice-president of Sinn Féin. The republican movement in the 1970s was split between the more pragmatic northern leadership which surrounded Adams, and the more traditional nationalist cadre surrounding longtime southern-based leader, school teacher Ruairí Ó Brádaigh.

In the 1970s the split was seen as being between those, close to Adams, who advocated a military-only strategy and those who thought that negotiations with the British would bring results. A 1973 ceasefire between the IRA and the British was widely seen as a disaster by republicans and as a result Adams (allegedly) rose to become the most senior figure in the IRA's Northern Command on the basis of his absolute rejection of anything but military action. However, during his time in prison Adams came to reassess his approach. Although 'provisional' republicanism was founded on its oppostion to the communist-inspired "broad front" politics of the Cathal Goulding's Official IRA, in prison Adams came to recognise the power of political as well as military action.

Writing under the pseudonym Brownie in Republican News, Adams outlined a strategy later famously described by Danny Morrison as 'the ballot box in one hand and the armalite in the other' based on building mass resistance as well as military power.

Adams felt his position was vindicated when the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikes by republican prisoners in the H blocks of the Maze prison (known as Long Kesh in Ireland) saw Sinn Féin make a big electoral breakthrough in elections in 1982 to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

A major split on tactics, both military and political occurred in 1983, when the southern leadership was replaced by a northern leadership under Adams. Central to this division was a change, in 1986, in the longterm policy of abstention from Dáil Éireann, a policy based on the republican refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Republic of Ireland.

Republicans had long claimed that the only legitimate Irish state was the Irish Republic declared in the Proclamation of the Republic of 1916, which they considered to be still in existence. In their view, the legitimate government was the IRA Army Council, which had been vested with the authority of that Republic on the eve of the Second World War by the last remaining anti-Treaty deputies of the Second Dáil. Adams continued to adhere to this claim of republican political legitimacy until quite recently - however in his 2005 speech to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis he explicitly rejected it.

As a result of this non-recognition, Sinn Féin had abstained from taking any of the seats they won in the British or Irish parliaments. A small minority under the deposed leader, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, split Sinn Féin, just as Ó Brádaigh had done twelve years earlier. The defeated minority insisted that they were the real Sinn Féin republicans, and named their new party Republican Sinn Féin.

Adams was elected leader of Sinn Féin, and a new northern cadre of leadership, including such figures as Danny Morrison and Martin McGuinness, took control of the movement and its policy. Adams and others pointed to Sinn Féin electoral successes in the early and mid-1980s, when hunger strikers Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty were elected to the British House of Commons and Dáil Éireann respectively, to advocate that Sinn Féin become increasingly political and base its influence on electoral politics rather than paramilitarism. The electoral effects of this strategy were shown later by the election of Adams and McGuinness to the British House of Commons.

Voice Ban

In popular consciousness in Britain, Adams is primarily remembered during the latter part of this period for the ban on the media broadcast of his voice (the ban actually covered all Irish republican organisations, but in practice Adams was the only one prominent enough to appear regularly on TV). This ban was imposed by the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher on October 19th, 1988, the reason given being to "deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity" after the BBC interviewed Martin McGuinness.

A similar ban, known as Section 31, had been law in the Republic of Ireland since the 1970s. However media outlets soon found ways around the ban, initially by the use of subtitles, but latterly and more commonly by the use of an actor reading his words over the images of him speaking.

This ban was much lampooned in cartoons and satirical TV shows, notably Spitting Image, and was criticised by freedom of speech organisations worldwide and British media personalties, including BBC Director General John Birt and BBC foreign editor John Simpson. The ban was lifted by Prime Minister John Major on 17 September, 1994. The lifting of the ban caused a small media stir as a generation of people listened to his first unrestricted interview to hear what his voice actually sounded like.

Moving into mainstream politics

Sinn Féin continued its policy of refusing to sit in the Westminster parliament even after Adams won the West Belfast constituency. He lost his seat to the SDLP in the 1992 general election but regained it at the next election in 1997.

Under Adams, Sinn Féin appeared to move away from being a political mouthpiece of the Provisional IRA to becoming a professionally organised political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

SDLP leader John Hume, MP identified the possibility that a negotiated settlement might be possible and began secret talks with Adams in 1988. These discussions led to unofficial contacts began with the British Northern Ireland Office under the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, and with the government of the Republic under Charles Haughey – although both governments maintained in public that they would not negotiate with "terrorists" .

These talks provided the groundwork for what was later to be the Belfast Agreement, as well as to the milestone Downing Street Declaration and the Joint Framework Document.

These negotiations led to the IRA cease-fire in August 1994. Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds (who had replaced Haughey) and who had played a key role in the Hume/Adams dialogue through his Special Advisor Martin Mansergh, regarded the ceasefire as permanent. However the slow pace of developments, contributed in part to the (wider) political difficulties of the British government of John Major and consequent reliance on Ulster Unionist Party votes in the House of Commons, led the IRA to end its ceasefire and resume its violent campaign.

A relaunched ceasefire later followed as part of the negotiations strategy, which saw teams from the British and Irish governments, the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP, Sinn Féin and representatives of loyalist paramilitary organisations, under the chairmanship of former United States Senator Mitchell, produced the Belfast Agreement (also called the Good Friday Agreement as it was signed on Good Friday, 1998). Under the agreement, structures were created reflecting the Irish and British identities of the people of Ireland, with a British-Irish Council and a Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly created.

Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic's constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, which claimed sovereignty over all of Ireland, were reworded, and a power-sharing Executive Committee was provided for. As part of their deal Sinn Féin agreed to abandon its abstentionist policy regarding a "six-county parliament", as a result taking seats in the new Stormont-based Assembly and running the education and health & social services ministries in the power-sharing government.

Opponents in Republican Sinn Féin accused Sinn Féin of "selling out" by agreeing to participate in what it called "partitionist assemblies" in the Republic and Northern Ireland. However Gerry Adams insisted that the Belfast Agreement provided a mechanism to deliver a united Ireland by non-violent and constitutional means, much as Michael Collins had said of the Anglo-Irish Treaty nearly 80 years earlier.

When Sinn Féin came to nominate its two ministers to the Executive Council, the party, like the SDLP and the Democratic Unionist Party chose for tactical reasons not to include its leader among its ministers. (When later the SDLP chose a new leader, it selected one of its ministers, Mark Durkan, who then opted to remain in the Committee.)

On 20 February, 2005, Irish Minister for Justice Michael McDowell publicly named Adams as a member of the seven-man ruling IRA army council during a radio interview (see [[4]]). According to the British government, he has been a member for over 20 years, although he has never been convicted of IRA membership and continues to deny it. In July, McDowell said that, according to senior police sources, three Sinn Fein leaders, including Adams, had stepped down from the IRA command in a prelude to a peace move. Adams denied the report. "We can't stand down from a body of which we were not members", he said (see [[5]]).

Adams remains the all-Ireland head of Sinn Féin, with Caomhín Ó Caolain serving as Sinn Féin parliamentary leader in Dáil Éireann, and Martin McGuinness the party's chief negotiator and effective party head in the Northern Ireland Assembly. McGuinness has also been named by the Irish government as a member of the IRA's ruling army council.

External links

Sinn Fein - Gerry Adams official profile
Guardian Politics Ask Aristotle - Gerry Adams
TheyWorkForYou.com - Gerry Adams MP
The Public Whip - Gerry Adams voting record
"Irish minister says Adams is an IRA leader" by Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, 21 February, 2005
"Dubbing SF voices becomes the stuff of history", The Irish Times, 17 September, 1994