Adams, Gerry (b. 1948)

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ADAMS, GERRY (b. 1948)

Irish republican.

By far the most significant Irish republican since Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins, Gerry Adams was born in the Lower Falls area of West Belfast to parents whose families had a history of involvement in Irish republicanism. The family moved to the new public housing estate of Ballymurphy in the early 1950s. His secondary education was at St. Mary's Grammar School, a Christian Brothers establishment. He left school at the age of fifteen and got a job as a barman.

Adams joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1965, a fact that he continues to deny. At this time the chief of staff of the IRA, the Dubliner Cathal Goulding, was taking the organization in a left-wing direction. Although many traditional republicans in Belfast resisted this move, Adams was sympathetic. Adams and other republicans were active in the civil rights movement, launched in 1967, aimed at ending the anti-Catholic discrimination practiced by the Unionist regime at Stormont. However, the civil rights marches were opposed by the supporters of the loyalist, Protestant fundamentalist Ian Paisley, leading to increasing sectarian tension. The outbreak of serious sectarian violence in Belfast in August 1969 allowed the traditionalists to assert themselves against Goulding, whom they accused of letting down defenseless Catholic communities. The IRA split into Provisional and Official sections and, after some initial hesitation because of the rabid anticommunism and conservatism of many of its founding members, Adams threw in his lot with the Provisionals.

He soon emerged as a leading member of the IRA in Ballymurphy and became the officer commanding the Provisional's second battalion in the city. He was interned in 1971 but released in July 1972 to be part of an IRA delegation that met the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, for secret talks in London. He was adjutant of the Belfast IRA on Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, when the organization exploded twenty-six bombs throughout the city, killing nine people. Arrested in July 1973, he did not emerge from prison until 1977. In "Cage 11" of the Long Kesh prison, he was the key figure in a rethinking of republican military and political strategy that resulted in a commitment to a "long war." For Adams the "long war" could take up to two decades and would necessitate developing the political arm of the republican movement. He spoke of the need for "active republicanism" that would entail social and political involvement to ensure that republicans were not isolated around a purely militarist approach. He was a severe critic of the southern-based leadership of the movement for agreeing to a cease-fire with the British in 1975, and from the mid-1970s he and his supporters set out to take over the movement.

The northerners were greatly assisted by the hunger strikes of 1980–1981, when Bobby Sands and nine of his comrades died in a struggle to obtain the status of political prisoners. Sands was elected to the Westminster Parliament in a by-election in 1981, and in 1982 Sinn Féin, the political arm of the movement, made its first major breakthrough in the elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, winning just over 10 percent of the vote. In 1983 Adams, who was now president of Sinn Féin, won the West Belfast seat at Westminster. From the early 1980s he was convinced that the military struggle with the British was in stalemate and that republicans needed to build alliances with John Hume's Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Fianna Fail Party in the Irish Republic. Such a pan-nationalist front would then, with the support of Irish America, pressure Britain for a radical change in its Northern Ireland policy. However, the prerequisite for such an alliance was an IRA ceasefire.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement signed by the Irish prime minister Garret Fitzgerald and the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1985 convinced John Hume that Britain was now "neutral" on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. Republicans did not agree and the violence continued, leading to the breakdown of talks between Sinn Féin and the SDLP in 1988. However, contacts between Hume and Adams continued.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and a radically different international environment assisted Adams's strategy. In 1992 he and John Hume sketched out the basis for a settlement. However, the 1993 British/Irish Downing Street Declaration did not include a key element of "Hume-Adams"—Britain's commitment to act as a "persuader" of Unionists toward a united Ireland. Despite this omission, Adams was able to persuade the IRA to declare a cease-fire in August 1994. Although this broke down temporarily in 1996, it was reinstated when Tony Blair's Labour Party won the 1997 general election. With the strong support of President Clinton, the historic Good Friday Agreement of 1998 saw the Ulster Unionist Party led by David Trimble agree to share power with Sinn Féin, provided the IRA decommissioned all its weapons.

A section of the republican movement had begun to criticize Adams for betraying republican ideals by agreeing to a partitionist settlement. Its members set up the Real IRA and carried out the bombing of Omagh in August 1998, with the loss of twenty-nine lives. However, Adams's "peace strategy" allowed Sinn Féin to overtake the SDLP to become the largest nationalist party in Northern Ireland and a significant political force in the Republic of Ireland. His reluctance to finally break with the paramilitarism that had given Sinn Féin so much political leverage in the past led to repeated crises of the institutions created by the agreement, while at the same time strengthening the more inflexible Unionists led by Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party.

See alsoIRA; Ireland; Northern Ireland; Paisley, Ian; Sinn Féin.