Gerry Adams

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Gerry Adams, 2013

Gerard "Gerry" Adams ( Irish Gearóid Mac Ádhaimh ; born October 6, 1948 in Belfast , Northern Ireland ) is an Irish Republican politician , former president of the Sinn Féin party and since 2011 Teachta Dála (TD) for Louth (Member of the Irish House of Commons, Dáil Éireann ). From 1983 to 1992 and from 1995 to 2011 he was MP in the British House of Commons , but he never took his seat for ideological reasons (Sinn Féin politics of abstentionism), and from 1998 to 2010 MP (MLA) of the Northern Ireland- Assembly .

The former member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) to a leading figure into the Army Council, the governing body of the IRA, and the IRA Chief of Staff ( Chief of Staff to be), the commander of the underground organization, ascended. However, since the early 1980s, Adams has denied ever having been a member of the IRA, despite repeated reports from security agencies, journalists, and former comrades.

He was one of the vice-presidents of the Sinn Féin party from 1978 to 1983 and its party chairman from 1983 to 2018 . Adams is an important architect of the peace process in the Northern Ireland conflict, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 , the St Andrews Agreement in 2006 and the Hillsborough Agreement in 2010.

youth

Gerry Adams was born in 1948 as the son of Gerry Adams sr, an unskilled construction worker, and Annie Adams (née Hannaway), an unskilled worker in a linen factory , in the Catholic-nationalist-dominated West Belfast, the eldest of a total of ten children, five boys and five girls.

Adams was born into a working class family deeply rooted in Irish republicanism. His paternal grandfather (also called Gerry) was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) secret society . His father Gerry Adams Sr. joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) at the age of sixteen and received Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in 1942 after a failed attack on a Northern Irish police patrol , in which he himself was hit by three bullets, an eight-year prison sentence. Two of his paternal uncles, Dominic and Patrick, were detained without a trial for their IRA membership during World War II , Dominic in the Republic of Ireland and Patrick in Northern Ireland. Dominic Adams was a leading member of the bombing campaign in England early in the war.

The Hannaways, his mother's family, have a similar story. His maternal great grandfather, Michael Hannaway, was also a member of the IRB. His grandfather, Billy Hannaway, was Eamon de Valeras's election worker when he was elected in the 1918 British general election in West Belfast. He later broke with de Valera when he took the constitutional political path. Adams' mother was a member of the IRA women's organization Cumann na mBan . Three of her brothers, Tommy, Liam and Alfie, were well-known IRA members.

Adams, who initially lived with his maternal grandmother on Falls Road in West Belfast, soon moved with his parents to Greencastle on the northern outskirts of Belfast in a one-room apartment. As the family grew over the years, they returned to West Belfast in the 1950s. There, after the war, the Northern Irish government built a new residential area called Ballymurphy, where the Adams family now moved into an apartment in 11 Divismore Park. Gerry Adams then went to secondary Catholic boys' school St. Mary's Christian Brothers Grammar School.

IRA

Beginnings

In 1964, as a teenager, he began to be interested in Irish Republican politics and supported the then local Sinn Féin candidate as an election worker in an election in West Belfast, which culminated in a two-day street battle between Catholic nationalist youth and the police. The following year he dropped out of school and started working as a bartender to help his family earn a living. In 1966, at the age of 18, he joined the local D Company of the IRA's Belfast Brigade . In it his father had already fought against the Northern Irish state. Adams joined an organization in 1966 which, after its so-called Border Campaign (1956–1962) against Northern Ireland, was in a dispute over directions. When the IRA laid down its arms in 1962 and announced the end of the Border Campaign, many members left the underground organization in disappointment. When company commander Liam McParland was killed in a car accident in November 1969, Gerry Adams took over his post.

When the violence escalated in Northern Ireland in 1969 and the Northern Ireland conflict began, the IRA finally split into the politically and socially oriented Official Irish Republican Army and the initially almost purely militaristic Provisional Irish Republican Army . Adams and D Company joined the Provisional IRA in Belfast in April 1970. There he soon became the commander of the new 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade . In the 2nd Battalion he met Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes , who became his long-term close confidants and allies.

Belfast guided tour

After the internment policy of the Northern Irish and British governments was introduced on August 9, 1971, the then commander of the Belfast Brigade, Joe Cahill, gave a public press conference the following day at a school in the Ballymurphy neighborhood in which he claimed that the internment would not cause the IRA has been weakened. Nevertheless, after this propaganda coup, Cahill had to flee to the Republic of Ireland to avoid arrest. So Seamus Twomey took over Cahill's position as brigade commander. Twomey named Adams his deputy.

The following year, Adams was arrested and interned by the British Army on March 14, 1972 . He was first taken to the RUC Police Station on Springfield Road, where police identified him after impersonating Joe McGuigan when he was arrested. He then moved to the Palace Barracks in Holywood on the eastern outskirts of Belfast. In the first waves of internment there, his cousin Kevin Hannaway (later Quartermaster General and Deputy IRA Chief of Staff in the 1980s ) was so badly mistreated that he suffered permanent psychological and physical damage. Now Adams was also mistreated in the Palace Barracks. After the interrogations he was interned on the Maidstone prison ship , where he met his uncles Alfie and Liam. When the Maidstone was abandoned as a prison, Adams was transferred to the Long Kesh internment camp , which was also where his father and brother Paddy were held at the time.

On June 26, 1972, the IRA declared a temporary ceasefire, whereupon an IRA delegation met with a British delegation under the leadership of the then Northern Ireland Minister William Whitelaw on July 7, 1972 for secret talks in London . Adams was one of the IRA leaders present as he was specially released for this meeting. The other IRA leaders were Seán Mac Stíofáin , Dáithí Ó Conaill , Seamus Twomey, Ivor Bell, and Martin McGuinness . The talks were not very constructive, so that the IRA lifted the ceasefire just two days later.

Adams, along with the other IRA commanders such as Twomey, Bell and Hughes on Belfast's staff, was responsible for planning and organizing several major bomb attacks in Belfast. These included the attack on the Abercorn restaurant on March 4, 1972, in which two people were killed and over a hundred injured, as well as the so-called Bloody Friday on July 21, 1972. In this series of attacks on July 21, between exploded in just over an hour 19 and 22 car bombs across Belfast - nine of them within 18 minutes and six within three minutes. Nine people were killed and over a hundred injured again. There were many seriously injured among those injured in these attacks, some of whom were terribly mutilated. While the IRA claimed that it did not intentionally kill civilian victims and that the British security forces often did not respond properly to the warnings, these attacks, particularly Bloody Friday , were not only popular among the general public but also among most IRA sympathizers Disgust and indignation. Until 1972 the IRA had control of many areas in West Belfast, but now the British Army marched into such areas in a major operation called Operation Motorman on July 31, 1972 and built permanent, fortified posts to protect the IRA's freedom of movement to restrict. After this setback, Seamus Twomey, like Joe Cahill before, was relieved of the position of brigade commander and sent to the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin to represent the Belfast IRA there. He was succeeded by Gerry Adams, who made Ivor Bell his deputy.

Long Kesh

On July 19, 1973, Adams and other senior members of the IRA were arrested and interned in Belfast. In Long Kesh he was imprisoned with Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes. When the IRA leadership again declared a ceasefire in February 1975 and again negotiated secretly with British officials, Adams and his two comrades were skeptical. The armistice ended in January 1976. Adams, Bell and Hughes accused the leadership of incompetence and the weakening of the fighting strength and morale of the IRA. In the internment camp, they designed a new structure for the IRA. For example, so that its units would be as difficult to infiltrate as possible, the underground organization should in future have a cell structure and an internal security service with overall responsibility . In addition, the IRA should be divided into a Northern Command and a Southern Command. The IRA should also focus on a long war rather than a quick military victory and develop a so-called green book .

The group sought out allies with Brian Keenan and Martin McGuinness outside the prison, who also advocated a reorganization. In the end, the suggestions were adopted by the IRA leadership. When the Irish police Garda Síochána arrested the then IRA chief of staff Seamus Twomey in Dublin in December, the latter had a copy of the restructuring plans with him.

Army Council

After his release in 1977, Adams was soon appointed to the seven-member Army Council, the highest governance body of the IRA. There he became Deputy Chief of Staff Twomey in the summer of 1977 and, after his arrest at the end of 1977, himself IRA Chief of Staff.
On February 18, 1978, the RUC and soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of Light Infantry (B Company) arrested Adams again after the IRA had carried out an attack on the La Mon restaurant in east Belfast the day before . 12 civilians were killed and 30 injured. It is still considered to be one of the most serious atrocities during the entire Northern Ireland conflict. Adams then spent seven months in Crumlin Road Prison as an accused IRA member. The allegations were based on excerpts from an annual Sinn Féin party conference that had been broadcast in a documentary on the BBC's Panorama program. In the end, in the absence of sufficient evidence, the case was dropped and the authorities had to release him, after which he resumed his place on the Army Council. However, he had lost his position as chief of staff to Martin McGuinness. His new position was for a couple of years that of the IRA's Northern Command, which was responsible for all IRA operations within Northern Ireland and in the five adjacent counties of the Republic of Ireland, Cavan , Donegal , Leitrim , Louth and Monaghan .
According to media reports, Gerry Adams remained a simple member of the Army Council until May 2005. However, since the early 1980s until today, Adams has denied ever having been a simple IRA member himself. Two months after his departure, the Army Council announced the end of the armed campaign.

Sinn Féin

As of 1978, Adams was another vice president of Sinn Féin. When the IRA and Sinn Féin became more and more politicized during the hunger strike in Maze Prison in 1981 and participated in the first elections, Adams supported this. Together with his supporters, he maneuvered the old southern Irish leadership around Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill , so that the IRA and Sinn Féin rejected their éire-nua policy (mainly federalism ), which had been in force since 1972 , and made a shift to the left. In 1983 he succeeded Ó Brádaigh as chairman of the party.

In the elections to the British House of Commons in 1983 and 1987, and since 1997, he was elected MP for the Belfast-West constituency, most recently in 2010 with almost 70 percent of the vote. He never took the seat in the House of Commons, however, as he refused, like all members of the Sinn Féin, to take the associated oath of allegiance to the Queen.

In 1986, under the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the IRA and Sinn Féin gave up abstentionism towards the Dáil Éireann , i.e. the renouncement of taking possible seats in the Irish Parliament. As a result, some old traditionalist cadres, mainly from the Republic of Ireland, split off from the Sinn Féin and the IRA, and founded a new party called the Republican Sinn Féin . Among them were Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill.

Together with John Hume , chairman of the Social Democratic , Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), Adams brought new movement to the Northern Ireland conflict in 1993 with a peace initiative. The result was the unconditional ceasefire that the IRA announced on August 31, 1994.

When the IRA broke its 17-month ceasefire in February 1996 - two people were killed and over a hundred injured in a bomb attack in London's Docklands - Adams emphasized that the only way to save the peace process was to start all-party talks soon. The way there was only cleared in July 1997 by a new ceasefire by the IRA.

In October 1997, Gerry Adams became the first Sinn Féin leader to meet Tony Blair, a British Prime Minister, since the partition of Ireland . The negotiations resulted in the so-called Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998 . He was a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly established under the agreement from the first election in 1998 to November 2010 as a member of the Belfast West constituency .

Adams told the Guardian in the summer of 2004 that the torture photos of Abu Ghraib were not a new sight for him, and that he, too, had been systematically tortured with his like-minded prisoners in the 1970s. Shortly thereafter, he held out the prospect of dissolving the IRA if the Protestant party DUP was ready to form a government coalition with Sinn Féin. But the DUP, represented by Ian Paisley , would not make a decision until the IRA disbanded its "private army" with all weapons and made this public with photos. While Adams' Sinn Féin has shown itself increasingly willing to compromise in recent years, the Protestant side still rejects disarmament.

In a fundamental reorientation, Adams announced on November 14, 2010 his intention to run for the seat of Arthur Morgan, now vacant in County Louth , in the next general election in the Republic of Ireland on March 11, 2011 . At the same time he announced that he was giving up his seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly and Westminster , which he had completed in two steps by January 20, 2011. On February 25, 2011, Adams was elected MP in Dáil Éireann in the County Louth constituency.

In November 2017, Adams announced his resignation as chairman of the Sinn Féin for 2018. He also announced that he would not run again for a seat in the Irish Parliament.

Assassinations of Gerry Adams

On March 14, 1984, Adams was seriously injured in an attack by the Protestant-loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) in central Belfast . The assassins fired around 20 shots at the car in which he was sitting. He was hit in the neck, shoulder and arm, then taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital for an operation. Three suspects were later convicted. Adams claimed that British security forces were aware of the assassination plans and still did not prevent the attack.

Law enforcement and trial

Arrested in 2014

Adam's tenure as commanding the Belfast Brigade included the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, a converted Catholic, mother of ten and widow from the Divis Flats in West Belfast, in December 1972. McConville's body was secretly buried on a beach in County Louth . The IRA only assumed responsibility after more than 20 years when it released information about the whereabouts of the body. However, her remains were found accidentally by hikers on Shelling Hill Beach in August 2003. Rumors that McConville was killed in retaliation for helping an injured British soldier was rejected in an official investigation. The IRA later claimed that McConville had leaked information about local Republicans to the UK security forces via a secret radio transmitter . McConville's children said no. In July 2006, following an investigation , the Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan announced that there was no evidence of McConville's secret service activities. When Boston College collected testimony from contemporary witnesses for an oral history project and they incriminated Adams, the authorities became aware of it. Adams was arrested and interrogated in April 2014 on charges of ordering the murder of McConville. He was released a few days later. On September 29, 2015, law enforcement officials ruled that no charges would be brought against Adams and six other people investigated in connection with the murder of Jean McConville. The evidence makes a conviction appear very unlikely. Jean McConville's children were unwilling to comment on this decision, but had previously reserved a civil action in the event of Adam's failure to prosecute.

family

Adams has been married to Colette McArdle since July 1971. They have a son named Gearóid who was born in 1973.

On December 18, 2009, the then 36-year-old Áine Tyrell, a daughter of Liam Adams, who is a younger brother of Gerry Adams, said that her father had abused her for years and beat her mother. She also accused her uncle Gerry of covering up the matter in the 1980s. Adams then announced that he also knew that his father, who died in 2003, had mentally, physically and sexually abused several of his children for years.

literature

Web links

Commons : Gerry Adams  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Details of the person on the House of Commons page , accessed on July 28, 2012
  2. ^ E. Moloney: A Secret History of the IRA . New York 2002, p. 513
  3. ↑ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 44 f.
  4. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 38
  5. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , pp. 44ff.
  6. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 46.
  7. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 84
  8. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 73.
  9. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 106.
  10. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 17.
  11. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , pp. 101ff.
  12. ↑ Dominic Casciani: Adams and the IRA's secret Whitehall talks. bbc.co.uk, January 1, 2003, accessed June 15, 2011 .
  13. ^ E. Moloney: Voices from the grave: Two Men's War in Ireland . New York 2010, p. 102 ff.
  14. ↑ Gray ghost . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1973 ( online ).
  15. ^ E. Moloney: A Secret History of the IRA . New York 2002, pp. 133-161.
  16. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , pp. 157f.
  17. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , pp. 163-172.
  18. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , pp. 172f.
  19. ^ Liam Clarke: Hardliners go in big IRA shuffle. timesonline.co.uk, May 1, 2005, accessed June 25, 2011 .
  20. ↑ Rosie Cowan: Adams denies IRA links as book calls him a genius . In: The Guardian , October 1, 2002
  21. ^ Full text: IRA statement. guardian.co.uk, July 28, 2005, accessed June 25, 2011 .
  22. ^ E. Moloney: A Secret History of the IRA, New York 2002 . P. 189ff.
  23. ↑ Greens 'vetoed' Cowen's plan to appoint ministers . In: The Irish Times , January 20, 2011
  24. ^ Adams to contest Louth seat. In: The Irish Times , November 14, 2010
  25. ^ Adams resigns Westminster seat . In: The Irish Times , January 20, 2011
  26. ^ Louth ( Memento of February 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) RTÉ News, February 27, 2011
  27. ↑ Ireland: Sinn Fein boss Adams announces withdrawal . tagesschau.de. Accessed November 19, 2017.
  28. ↑ 1984: Sinn Féin leader shot in street attack , BBC. March 14, 1984. Retrieved March 22, 2007. 
  29. ↑ Kevin Maguire: Adams wants 1984 shooting probe , BBC. December 14, 2006. Retrieved March 22, 2007. 
  30. ^ A b No evidence for McConville agent claim: O'Loan. rte.ie, July 7, 2006, accessed June 25, 2011 .
  31. ↑ a b Owen Bowcott: Belfast police sorry for failing woman's family. guardian.co.uk, August 15, 2006, accessed June 25, 2011 .
  32. ↑ Unlawful killing of McConville: verdict. rte.ie, April 5, 2004, accessed June 25, 2011 .
  33. ↑ Steven Erlanger: Gerry Adams Questioned Over Murder From 1972. nytimes.com, April 30, 2014, accessed April 30, 2014
  34. ↑ Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams arrested. In: Spiegel Online from May 1, 2014 (accessed May 1, 2014).
  35. ^ Henry McDonald: Gerry Adams will not face charges over Jean McConville murder. The Guardian , September 29, 2015, accessed September 29, 2015 .
  36. ^ E. Moloney: A Secret History of the IRA . New York 2002, p. 107.
  37. ^ A Secret History of the IRA , p. 161
  38. ↑ Terrible family . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 2009 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Adams, Gerry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Adams, Gerard; Mac Ádhaimh, Gearóid (Irish)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Northern Irish politician, Member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Belfast , Northern Ireland