Adams, Gerald (1948- )

Northern Ireland republican politician, President of Provisional Sinn Fein. Adams was born the eldest of ten children in the Falls Road in nationalist West Belfast. After attending grammar school he became a barman, and was involved in the defence of Catholic areas of Belfast during the communal violence of 1969-1970. The British security forces believed him to be a senior member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the 1970s, though he has strenuously denied this. He was interned in 1971 and released in July 1972 to take part in talks with the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, in London. The talks resulted in a brief ceasefire.

Adams was arrested once again in 1973 on the suspicion of being a senior member of the IRA. After attempting to escape from the Maze Prison before his trial, he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment for this offence and released in 1976. In February 1978 he was once again charged with membership of the IRA, but was later released due to insufficient evidence.

From the late 1970s Adams became the leading proponent within the IRA's associated political party Sinn Fein for a reassessment of its policies and fundamentalist commitment to armed struggle. In 1979 he stated that Sinn Fein needed to use means other than violence to achieve its aims. This set in train Sinn Fein's political development during the early 1980s, when the party began to take an active part in local and general elections. Adams was a key figure in the political programme that accompanied and followed the 1981 hunger strikes by IRA prisoners in British prisons. In 1983 he defeated Gerry Fitt, the long-sitting constitutional nationalist Member of Parliament for West Belfast, and was elected President of Provisional Sinn Fein.

A year later he was the victim of a loyalist attack, and was shot several times in the back of a car as it drove through central Belfast. In 1986 he published his Politics of Irish Freedom, which presented his own political views to an external audience while offering Sinn Fein an internal discussion document. During the late 1980s he also became mildly critical of IRA killings of civilians, which he argued were detrimental to the Republican cause. He was narrowly defeated in the 1992 general election, losing his West Belfast seat.

Sporadically from 1986, Adams was involved in talks with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) constitutional nationalist leader John Hume. Together they were substantially responsible for creating the conditions for the declaration of an IRA ceasefire in August 1994. In October 1994 United States President Bill Clinton lifted an official ban on government contacts with Sinn Fein, and met with Adams in March 1995. However, the IRA's resumption of violence in February 1996 (a move Adams refused to condemn) seriously damaged his credibility as leader of the Sinn Fein/IRA republican bloc. In March 1996 he tried to join talks in Stormont Castle, Northern Ireland's parliament building, on elections to a forum to select teams for all-party negotiations in Northern Ireland, but was turned away; he promised Sinn Fein participation in the elections but not the forum itself.

Following Sinn Fein's success in the May 1996 elections, he declared the party ready to accept previously agreed proposals on arms decommissioning, but was refused participation in all-party talks until the IRA resumed its ceasefire. In June he made another public attempt to enter Stormont, to join the all-party talks, but was refused entry. He drafted fresh proposals for an IRA ceasefire with SDLP leader John Hume, but attacked John Major's November 1996 restatement of ceasefire terms in response as sabotage. In the United Kingdom general election on May 1, 1997, he regained his West Belfast seat, defeating the SDLP incumbent; Dr Marjorie Mowlam, the British Labour Party's Northern Ireland Secretary designate, reiterated that Sinn Fein would not be admitted to talks without a new IRA ceasefire. Following an IRA ceasefire in July 1997, Sinn Fein was invited by the British government to join the Ulster talks.

The secretive nature of Sinn Fein politics, and its exact relationship with its military wing, the Provisional IRA, make any accurate assessment of Adams impossible. However, he has clearly been an important influence in moving Sinn Fein and the IRA away from their purely militarist policies of the 1970s towards more politically oriented activity in the 1980s and 1990s. In April 1998, as part of a Sinn Fein delegation, Adams participated in historic peace negotiations with representatives of other Ulster parties and the British and Irish governments.

The resulting so-called Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on May 22. Adams condemned the bombing at Omagh in August 1998 by an IRA splinter group, and in September announced that Sinn Fein considered violence "a thing of the past" in Northern Ireland politics. However, he remained insistent that the IRA would not decommission its arms before taking seats in the new Northern Ireland assembly, and made no compromise on this during talks on the first anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in March and April 1999 intended to resolve the issue, refusing a decommissioning formula drafted by the British and Irish governments.