GERRY ADAMS

I'd met Adams on a cold, grey Easter Monday in Belfast in 1994. ….             After the pleasantries were completed I was led to a small upstairs room.  The Irish News poster, "Sinn Fein shrugs off bomb attack", plastered on the wall adjoining the street explained why the upstairs windows had been replaced by bricks and mortar.  The Loyalist enemy had fired a rocket at the building only a few days earlier. 

Inside Falls Road.

 

For all the vilification and misrepresentation he received at the hands of the British press Adams was remarkably conciliatory. 

"What we're looking for is for London and Dublin to come to an agreement to end the partition of the country and to do so in terms of a process around an agreed timeframe and to do so in consultation with all parties. And we're mindful that the Unionists especially, know they're a very large section of our people, are hostile to all of these ideas and want to protect their own position.  They're victims of the history of the place.  So it should be done in a way that seeks to get their participation and their fullest involvement," he said. 

The BBC waits.

 

For someone whose life was in constant danger and in whom travelled the impassioned aspirations of a tribe dispossessed but unconquered since the Treaty of 1921, he was astonishingly calm.  At the time of our meeting, Sinn Fein and the IRA were in protracted discussions about a ceasefire.  Two years after its declaration, in the wake of British intransigence, uncompromising Republicans such as Bernadette Devlin were accusing Sinn Féin of being duped just as Collins and his Party had been 75 years earlier.

 As told in my book Cleary Independent published by HarperCollins in 1998.