Gerry Adams

Biography

The dominant figure of modern Irish republicanism, Gerry Adams rose from the Catholic ghettos of Belfast to lead Sinn Féin, the political wing of the republican movement, for over three decades. Interned without trial in the early Troubles and long alleged (though he always denied it) to have been a senior IRA commander, he became the chief architect of the movement's shift from the bomb toward the ballot box. Working secretly with the moderate nationalist John Hume, Adams steered the republican movement into ceasefires and the peace process, negotiating the Good Friday Agreement and persuading a militant movement to accept a compromise settlement and, eventually, to decommission its weapons. A deeply divisive figure — hero to republicans, terrorist sympathiser to unionists — he is nonetheless widely credited as indispensable to ending the war.

Key Battles