Gerry Adams
Gerard Adams is a retired Irish Republican politician who was the president of Sinn Féin between 13 November 1983 and 10 February 2018, and served as a Teachta Dála for Louth from 2011 to 2020. From 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2011, he won election as a Member of Parliament of the UK Parliament for the Belfast West constituency, but followed the Sinn Féin policy of abstentionism.
Adams first became involved in Irish republicanism in the late 1960s, and was an established figure in Irish activism for more than a decade before his 1983 election to Parliament. In 1984, Adams was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by the Ulster Defence Association. From the late 1980s onwards, he was an important figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, entering into talks initially with Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume and then subsequently with the Irish and British governments. In 1986, he convinced Sinn Féin to change its traditional policy of abstentionism towards the Oireachtas, the parliament of the Republic of Ireland. In 1998, it also took seats in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. In 2005, the Provisional Irish Republican Army stated that its armed campaign was over and that it was exclusively committed to peaceful politics.
Adams has often been accused of being a member of the IRA leadership in the 1970s and 1980s, though he consistently denied any involvement in the organisation. In 2014, he was held for four days by the Police Service of Northern Ireland for questioning in connection with the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville. He was released without charge and a file was sent to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland, which later stated there was insufficient evidence to charge him.
Adams announced in November 2017 that he would step down as leader of Sinn Féin in 2018, and that he would not stand for re-election to his seat in Dáil Éireann in 2020. He was succeeded by Mary Lou McDonald at a special ardfheis on 10 February 2018.
Early life
Adams was born in the Ballymurphy district of Belfast on 6 October 1948 to a "strongly republican family". His parents, Anne and Gerry Adams Sr., came from republican backgrounds. His grandfather, also named Gerry Adams, was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood during the Irish War of Independence. Two of his uncles, Dominic and Patrick Adams, had been interned by the governments in Belfast and Dublin. In J. Bowyer Bell's book The Secret Army, Bell states that Dominic was a senior figure in the Irish Republican Army of the mid-1940s. Gerry Adams Sr. joined the IRA at age 16. In 1942, he participated in an IRA ambush on a Royal Ulster Constabulary patrol but was shot, arrested and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment. Adams's maternal great-grandfather, Michael Hannaway, was also a member of the IRB during its bombing campaign in England in the 1860s and 1870s. Michael's son, Billy, was election agent for Éamon de Valera at the 1918 general election in West Belfast.Adams attended St Finian's Primary School on Falls Road, where he was taught by La Salle brothers. Having passed the eleven-plus exam in 1960, he attended St Mary's Christian Brothers Grammar School. He left St Mary's with six O-levels and worked in bars.
Early political career
In the late 1960s, a civil rights campaign developed in Northern Ireland. After being radicalised by the Divis Street riots during the 1964 United Kingdom general election campaign, Adams joined Sinn Féin and Fianna Éireann. Adams was an active supporter and joined the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. The civil rights movement was met with violence from loyalist counter-demonstrations and the RUC, and British troops were called in at the request of the Government of Northern Ireland.In August 1971, internment was reintroduced to Northern Ireland under the Special Powers Act 1922. Adams was captured by British soldiers in March 1972. Adams was interned on, but on the Provisional IRA's insistence was released in June to take part in secret, but abortive talks in London. The IRA negotiated a short-lived truce with the British government and an IRA delegation met with British Home Secretary William Whitelaw at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The delegation included Adams, Martin McGuinness, Sean Mac Stiofain, Daithi O'Conaill, Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell and Dublin solicitor Myles Shevlin.
Adams was re-arrested in July 1973 and interned at the HM Prison Maze. After taking part in an IRA-organised escape attempt, he was sentenced to a period of imprisonment. During this time, he wrote articles in the paper An Phoblacht under the by-line "Brownie", where he criticised the strategy and policy of Sinn Féin president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Billy McKee, the IRA's officer commanding in Belfast. He was also highly critical of a decision taken by McKee to assassinate members of the rival Official IRA, who had been on ceasefire since 1972. In 2020, the UK Supreme Court quashed Adams's convictions for attempting to escape on Christmas Eve in 1973 and again in July 1974.
In 1977, Ballymurphy priest Des Wilson assisted with an early attempt by Adams to open channels to dissident unionists. He helped set up meeting with Desmond Boal QC, a unionist barrister who had been first chairman of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party. At the time, Boal was co-operating with Seán MacBride as joint mediator in confidential negotiations between the Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force about a federal settlement for Ireland. A short time later, Wilson drove Adams to a meeting with John McKeague, founding member of the Red Hand Commando, then flirting with the idea of an independent Ulster. Inasmuch as they were "frank", Adams found the meetings "constructive", but could find no common political ground. Wilson was of the view that Adams was "one of the very few people who could actually bring a military campaign into a political campaign".
Provisional Irish Republican Army
Adams has consistently denied ever being a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.However, journalists such as Ed Moloney, Peter Taylor, and Mark Urban, and historians, such as Richard English and John Bowyer Bell, have all named Adams as part of the IRA leadership since the 1970s. Furthermore, several former IRA members, including Brendan Hughes, Ivor Bell, and Seán Mac Stíofáin, have said Adams was also a member of the organisation. Practically all academics agree that Adams joined the IRA in the mid-1960s, was the Officer commanding of the 2nd battalion of the Belfast Brigade from 1971 to 1972, became the adjutant for the brigade in 1972, and had become the OC of the brigade by 1973.
Moloney and Taylor state that Adams became the IRA's Chief of Staff following the arrest of Seamus Twomey in early December 1977, remaining in the position until 18 February 1978 when he, along with twenty other republican suspects, was arrested following the La Mon restaurant bombing. He was charged with IRA membership and remanded to Crumlin Road Gaol. He was released seven months later when the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland Robert Lowry ruled there was insufficient evidence to proceed with the prosecution. Moloney and English state Adams had been a member of the IRA Army Council since 1977, remaining a member until 2005, according to former Irish Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell.
Rise in Sinn Féin
In 1978, Adams became joint vice-president of Sinn Féin and a key figure in directing a challenge to the Sinn Féin leadership of president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and joint vice-president Dáithí Ó Conaill. The 1975 IRABritish truce is often viewed as the event that began the challenge to the original Provisional Sinn Féin leadership, which was dominated by southerners like Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill.One of the reasons that the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Féin were founded, in December 1969 and January 1970, respectively, was that people like Ó Brádaigh, Ó Conaill and McKee opposed participation in constitutional politics. The other reason was the failure of the Cathal Goulding leadership to provide for the defence of Irish nationalist areas during the 1969 Northern Ireland riots. When, at the December 1969 IRA convention and the January 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, the delegates voted to participate in the Dublin, Belfast and London parliaments, the organisations split. Adams, who had joined the republican movement in the early 1960s, sided with the Provisionals.
In the Maze prison in the mid-1970s, writing under the pseudonym "Brownie" in Republican News, Adams called for increased political activity among republicans, especially at local level. The call resonated with younger Northern people, some of whom had been active in the Provisional IRA but few of whom had been active in Sinn Féin. In 1977, Adams and Danny Morrison drafted the address of Jimmy Drumm at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown. The address was viewed as watershed in that Drumm acknowledged that the war would be a long one and that success depended on political activity that would complement the IRA's armed campaign. For some, this wedding of politics and armed struggle culminated in Danny Morrison's statement at the 1981 Sinn Féin ardfheis in which he asked "Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?" For others, however, the call to link political activity with armed struggle had already been defined in Sinn Féin policy and in the presidential addresses of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, but this had not resonated with young Northerners.
File:Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, Martin McGuinness & Gerry Adams at Bodenstown, 1997.jpg|thumb|Adams with Martin McGuinness and Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin in 1997
Even after the election of Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, a part of the mass mobilisation associated with the 1981 Irish hunger strike by republican prisoners in the H blocks of the Maze Prison, Adams was cautious that the level of political involvement by Sinn Féin could lead to electoral embarrassment. Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach of Ireland, called an election for June 1981. At an ard chomhairle meeting, Adams recommended that they contest only four constituencies which were in border counties. Instead, H-Block/Armagh candidates contested nine constituencies and elected two TDs. This, along with the election of Sands, was a precursor to an electoral breakthrough in elections in 1982 to the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly. Adams, Danny Morrison, Martin McGuinness, Jim McAllister and Owen Carron were elected as abstentionists. The Social Democratic and Labour Party had announced before the election that it would not take any seats and so its 14 elected representatives also abstained from participating in the Assembly and it was a failure. The 1982 election was followed by the 1983 Westminster election, in which Sinn Féin's vote increased and Adams was elected, as an abstentionist, as MP for Belfast West. It was in 1983 that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh resigned as President of Sinn Féin and was succeeded by Adams.
In 1983, Adams was elected president of Sinn Féin and became the first Sinn Féin MP elected to the British House of Commons since Phil Clarke and Tom Mitchell in the mid-1950s. Following his election as MP for Belfast West, the British government lifted a ban on his travelling to Great Britain. In line with Sinn Féin policy, he refused to take his seat in the House of Commons.