Gerry Adams

While he denies ever having been a member of the Irish Republican Army, most close observers of Northern Ireland’s more than 25 years of war believe it is unlikely that Gerry Adams could have risen to his current position as president of Sinn Fein without emerging from the crucible of that organization.

In his first address as president in 1983, Adams told a party congress that armed struggle was “a morally correct form of resistance” against the British government’s presence in Northern Ireland. By the late 1980s, Adams and other prominent republicans began rethinking that strategy when it became apparent that there would be no military solution in Northern Ireland. He and John Hume, the more moderate leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, developed a set of principles that became the foundation for the Good Friday peace agreement, signed in 1998 and approved overwhelmingly by voters in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Since then, one crisis after another has threatened progress. The latest was precipitated by the refusal of Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble to allow Sinn Fein representation on the North-South Ministerial Council set up under the provisions of the Good Friday agreement. The council was designed to allow the Dublin government input into Northern Irish political decisions, a key nationalist component of the peace agreement. Trimble has put the council on hold because of political pressure from within his Ulster Unionist Party to exclude Sinn Fein for the IRA’s failure to decommission weapons.

Adams grew up in a working-class neighborhood of West Belfast, an experience that shaped his political development and has sustained his involvement in republican activism. He became a major figure in the republican movement in the early 70s. Jailed in 1972, seven months after internment without trial was introduced, he was released to participate in secret--and unsuccessful--negotiations with the British. He was jailed again in 1973 and remained there for four years. He has twice been elected a member of Parliament for West Belfast, a seat he refuses to take, as Sinn Fein does not recognize British rule in Northern Ireland.

Adams, 52, is married to Colette McArdle. They have one son. He was interviewed in New York City, where he attended a Sinn Fein fund-raiser.

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Question: Do you see a resolution to the current impasse?

Answer: I have significant concerns about the British government’s handling of this situation. It was fairly easy to see this crisis coming. . . In fact, when we put together the package that led to the political institutions being put back into place after they were suspended last February--all that was predicated upon the British government fulfilling the commitments it had made under the terms of the Good Friday agreement and on May 5th, directly before the IRA allowed the first inspection of its arms dumps. [When] I went to see the British government in June, I said “Make sure you deliver on demilitarization,” “Make sure you deliver on policing” [reform], because if you leave it until the autumn, Trimble is going to call a conference, or his detractors are going to call a conference, and you’re going to find it difficult. I told Prime Minister Tony Blair we can’t have this continuous renegotiation of our human rights. We can’t have a continuous negotiation of the equality agenda.

Q: Aren’t the British trying to save David Trimble in order to save the peace process?

A: The peace process is bigger than the political process. What the British government has done is to make their commitments . . . conditional and secondary to their protection of the unionist position. And that’s the fatal flaw. That immediately gives people on the unionist side the ability to dictate the pace and quality of the developments that are required. For example, if the objective becomes to save Trimble, then that’s giving the advantage to Trimble, and he wouldn’t be a good political leader if he didn’t use that to seek concessions that suited his particular argument. The peace process cannot be reduced to the fortunes of one political leader.

Q: Don’t you use the retention of IRA weapons to leverage movement on police reform, demilitarization and other issues important to you?

A: These are all stand-alone issues. We deserve a decent policing service [and] political institutions that people can have ownership of. The British government established the Patten Commission [on police reform] and came up with recommendations. Now, Sinn Fein would have gone for much more radical recommendations, but we said fair enough, Patten is a compromise and maybe this is the beginning of a new policing service. What did the British government do? They emasculated it.

Q: In May, the IRA made a statement that it would re-engage the Independent Commission on Disarmament to work through details of decommissioning weapons. That hasn’t been done. Why?

A: Trimble’s move doesn’t just involve the disenfranchisement of Sinn Fein ministers. He has also called for a moratorium on implementing the Patten recommendations [and] said there will be a review by his party in January of all this. The IRA’s position is very straightforward: allow some of its arms dumps to be inspected. That was a huge move. [The IRA] said it was prepared to put weapons verifiably beyond use.

Q: Is the inspection of arms dumps synonymous with putting weapons permanently and verifiably beyond use?

A: It could, but I don’t think that was the intention. This is an evolving process. I think the intention is underscored in the IRA statement, which described [inspections of arms dumps] as a confidence-building measure mostly aimed toward unionists. For the first time in 200 years of resistance to British rule, you have the primary republican organization saying, “Yes, we are prepared to verifiably put weapons beyond use.” The [IRA] then outlined the context for doing this. It said it was prepared to discuss this with the [disarmament] commission, provided the British kept to their side of the bargain. [The British] have remilitarized [and] have not dealt with the policing issue. In a totally paradoxical way, a British prime minister has to reinforce an IRA leadership so that it can be more flexible as it moves ahead, and an IRA leadership has to reinforce the position of a British prime minister. From the IRA’s point of view, it has done that.

Q: If the IRA war is really over, why not decommission weapons, thereby taking the moral high ground and remove them as an issue?

A: First, within the IRA, the process is leadership-led, and leaderships can only do so much [in managing] their constituency. The most important thing within the IRA is to avoid any serious splits, because you would end up with the worst of all possible scenarios. You only have to look at what happened in the Middle East to see how a peace process can fall apart, with all the tragedy that comes with it. Second, IRA weapons are silent, and the weapons that are visible at the moment are the ones being used by the British. We have succeeded in getting people to silence their weapons and go to the sidelines while the rest of us take over the playing field. . . . It’s slow and it’s frustrating, but it’s better than war.

Q: The Real IRA, an anti-peace agreement splinter group, continues to use violence in its attempt to remove the British from Northern Ireland. Do you feel it is a threat to your leadership and, therefore, a threat to the peace process?

A: They make a lot of threatening remarks about our leadership, but that goes with the territory. We have to recognize they are a very small group . . . don’t have any popular support and don’t have a strategy. Most republicans, including the bulk of republicans who were involved in armed actions [in the past], support the strategy we have developed and are pursuing.

Q: Some of your republican critics say the peace agreement legitimizes continued British rule in Northern Ireland. How do you answer these arguments?

A: What I have to say, with some sadness, is that these criticisms don’t represent any significant tendency within republican activism. That’s the hard reality.

Q: You have a commitment to a unified Ireland. You have an agreement in place that says unification will only come with the consent of the people of Northern Ireland, including the unionist community. How do you see Irish unity taking place?

A: The primary political objective of Irish republicanism is our national independence and unity, and that has not changed. There may be different strategies and political tactics deployed [in] trying to build a cohesive, sustainable peace process. But that is . . . better than war. While the British are still [in Northern Ireland], the reality is that it’s now quite like a relationship in a marriage with children: The partners decide they are going to break up, but they wait until the children have grown up. That’s the only logical explanation for where the British are constitutionally. They say they are prepared to leave . . . Blair has to look back over hundreds of years of conflict and look forward 15 or 20 years . . . to a totally new era between the two islands and come up with unprecedented initiatives.

Q: Can you see a situation in which parity and equality between the communities reach a point at which the issue of joining with the Republic of Ireland becomes less and less important?

A: There may be people within the unionist family who have a genuine love for Britain. But at their core, many unionists are unionist because it makes them top dog, and they are used to it. Now if you bring about equality, there aren’t any top dogs, and people have to look about for some other form of identification. I think Nelson Mandela had it right when he said that his task was to set about liberating his oppressors.

Q: Globalization has changed the definition of national identity. You have the beginnings in Northern Ireland of a binational state built into the structure of the political institutions. In the words of the peace agreement, a citizen can identify himself and be accepted as “Irish, British or both.” Has this changed your thinking on the nature of Irish nationalism?

A: Nationalism is of great importance because we don’t have national independence. It isn’t so important in the United States, and your nationalism is probably patriotism. The core of the political issue in Ireland is one of political allegiance. One section of the people think their political allegiance lies with the Union and with Britain, and the rest of us believe our political allegiance lies with that concept of nationhood with the Irish people.

Q: In your autobiography, you argue that at least in the beginning of the modern “Troubles,” IRA actions were basically defensive. But throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, the IRA was engaged in a proactive armed struggle. In Catholic “just war” theology, violence has to be a last resort, primarily defensive in nature, must have popular support and the end achieved must outweigh the suffering imposed to achieve it. How do you morally and intellectually justify the IRA campaign?

A: In terms of moral theory, it depends on which Catholic theologians you talk to. The Catholic bishops reinforced and justified British Army killings on Bloody Sunday in Derry. Catholic bishops in [America] justified the U.S. war in Vietnam. . . . Over the last 30 years, there are things that happened that are unjustifiable. I think that’s the nature of war, and I think anyone who [tries] to give you a textbook idea of a clean war is engaging mainly in a public-relations exercise. There are other things that happened as a result of the human condition, the political condition that existed [during this time]. People get involved in armed action because they don’t see an alternative, or because there is no alternative. I’ve never been carried away by this silliness of glamorizing war. The outworking of the [peace] process I hope will bring about an end to violence forever, permanently and completely doing away with any possibility of war ever re-erupting in Ireland. *