Gerry Adams
Gerry Adams led Sinn Féin for thirty-four years and was central to bringing the Irish republican movement into constitutional politics. Born in west Belfast in 1948 into a family with a long republican history — his father had been shot and imprisoned — he worked as a barman and became involved in the civil rights movement and in housing agitation in the late 1960s. He was interned without trial in 1971, released in 1972 to take part in secret talks with the British government in London, and interned again from 1973 to 1977. He has always denied membership of the IRA. Historians of the conflict, and several former republicans, state that he was a senior figure in it; the Boston College oral history recordings led to his arrest and release without charge in 2014 over the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville. He became Sinn Féin president in 1983 and won the West Belfast seat at Westminster, which he did not take, following the party's abstentionist policy. His strategic contribution was to argue over years that armed struggle alone could not win and that electoral politics had to be pursued alongside it — the Armalite and the ballot box — and then to move the movement away from the first. His talks with John Hume from 1988, condemned across the political spectrum, produced the IRA ceasefires of 1994 and 1997 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. He was subject to a broadcasting ban in Britain from 1988 to 1994, during which his words were spoken by actors. He led Sinn Féin in the Irish parliament from 2011 and stood down in 2018.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: politician, revolutionary
