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Adams, Gerry

Born into a strongly republican family in the Falls area of West Belfast on 6 October 1948, Gerry Adams was a vice president of Sinn Féin and was instrumental in bringing about the Belfast Agreement of 1998. A scholarship boy, he was educated locally by the Irish Christian Brothers, leaving school at seventeen to become a barman. Radicalized by the 1964 "Tricolour Riots" in Belfast (when nationalists clashed with the Royal Ulster Constabulary which had removed an Irish flag), he joined Sinn Féin and, at its inception in 1967, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).

Following the split in the republican movement in 1970, Adams aligned himself with the militant Provisional wing in Belfast's Ballymurphy estate. Interned on suspicion of Irish Republican Army (IRA) involvement in March 1972, he was released dramatically in July to take part in secret but abortive talks in London between an IRA delegation and the British secretary of state, William Whitelaw. He was again imprisoned by the British authorities in 1973 and 1978 but was acquitted of IRA membership.

On his release, Adams was elected vice president of Sinn Féin (1978) and played a key policy-making role during the 1981 Hunger Strike (when ten republican prisoners starved themselves to death in support of political-prisoner status), from which his party emerged as a serious political force. In 1983 he became president of Sinn Féin and abstentionist MP for West Belfast, unseating the former Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader Gerry Fitt.

Though badly wounded by loyalist gunmen in 1984, Adams steadily pushed Sinn Féin toward greater political participation, overthrowing the southern-based "Old Guard" and paving the way for recognition of the Dáil in 1986 and the Hume-Adams dialogue between 1988 and 1994. These secret conversations between Adams and John Hume, the respected leader of the nonviolent SDLP, on the possibility of a peaceful alternative to "armed struggle" culminated in the first IRA cease-fire of August 1994 through February 1996.

Following its reinstatement in July 1997, Adams led his party into the all-party talks, which resulted in the Belfast Agreement of 1998, swinging grassroots support behind it. When Sinn Féin won a record 17.6 percent of the vote in the subsequent Northern Ireland Assembly elections, Adams steered his party into the new power-sharing executive, the devolved administration under the agreement first set up in December 1999, while declining a cabinet post himself.

In October 2001 Adams welcomed the IRA's historic decision to put some arms "beyond use," which helped to stabilize the Belfast Agreement and acknowledged unionist fears of Irish unity. In 2002 he launched his party's bid to gain a foothold in the Dáil, but he courted controversy in the United States by his refusal to testify at a congressional hearing on alleged IRA involvement in Colombia.

SEE ALSO Decommissioning; Hume, John; Irish Republican Army (IRA); Northern Ireland: Constitutional Settlement from Sunningdale to Good Friday; Northern Ireland: The United States in Northern Ireland since 1970; Trimble, David; Ulster Politics under Direct Rule; Primary Documents: Irish Republican Army (IRA) Cease-Fire Statement (31 August 1994); Text of the IRA Cease-Fire Statement (19 July 1997); The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (10 April 1998)

Bibliography

Sharrock, David, and Mark Devenport. Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorized Biography of Gerry Adams. 1997.

Éamon Phoenix