Profile: Gerry Adams

By Mark Devenport BBC Northern Ireland political editor

Probably the best known face of the Troubles on the world stage, the bearded Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams provokes sharply different reactions depending on your point of view.

Is he an IRA terrorist implicated in the Bloody Friday bombings in Belfast in 1972? Or is he an architect of the peace process who should have been awarded the Nobel prize?

Will he be remembered as a true Irish republican who achieved more than any in undermining partition?

Or as a traitor to his cause who sold out grass roots republicans, settling for respectability and a seat at Stormont?

Will the real Gerry Adams please stand up?

Gerry Adams provokes sharply different reactions

Virtually mobbed during his visits to the United States, some admirers viewed Gerry Adams as Belfast's answer to Nelson Mandela.

For many unionists, he remains the supreme hate figure, an apologist for IRA violence who carried the coffin of the Shankill bomber.

Gerry Adams claims to have never been a member of the IRA. Yet at crucial periods he has spoken with authority about the IRA's intentions.

To borrow a phrase from Churchill, Adams is truly "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".

In his youth, Gerry Adams worked as a barman in a Belfast city centre pub where he was fascinated by the political gossip traded amongst its clientele of journalists and lawyers.

However, as the civil rights movement gathered pace in the late 1960s, the young Adams didn't spend long pulling pints.

Soon he was out on the streets, involved in the protests of the time.

According to his own account, he was purely a political activist.

But his family was steeped in the traditions of the IRA. His father was jailed in the organisation's campaign during the Second World War. Security sources insist young Gerry followed suit.

Gerry Adams' own election victory in West Belfast in 1983 marked a major achievement for this dual "Armalite and ballot box" strategy

Like many republicans, Adams was interned without trial. But in 1972, at the tender age of 24, he was already considered important enough to be released from jail to join an IRA delegation that met the British Government in London.

Those talks failed to reach agreement. Despite his consistent denials, security sources say Gerry Adams went on to hold a number of senior positions within the IRA in the 1970s, including membership of the organisation's Army Council.

Both inside and outside jail, he's believed to have played a crucial role in key decisions such as the formation of the so-called "cell structure" which made the organisation hard to infiltrate.

However, Gerry Adams always had a wider political perspective. During the hunger strikes of the 1980s, he recognised the lessons of Bobby Sands' election as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

After the hunger strikes, the IRA did not reduce its commitment to "armed struggle" but its political wing, Sinn Fein, increasingly looked to the propaganda potential of fighting elections.

Gerry Adams' own election victory in West Belfast in 1983 marked a major achievement for this dual "Armalite and ballot box" strategy.

Soon afterwards, Adams brushed aside the old southern leadership of Sinn Fein, led by Ruairi O Bradaigh. Together with Martin McGuinness, he was now in an unrivalled position to guide republican strategy.

Gerry Adams carrying the coffin of an IRA bomber

His high profile made him a leading target for loyalist paramilitaries. In 1984, Gerry Adams survived injuries suffered in a UDA ambush in Belfast city centre, just one of a number of loyalist murder plots against him.

Sinn Fein's electoral successes unnerved the British and Irish governments. They came up with the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement, partly in an attempt to shore up the constitutional nationalism of John Hume's SDLP.

However, within three years of the Agreement, John Hume and Gerry Adams held private talks. The "Hume-Adams process" eventually delivered the 1994 IRA ceasefire which ultimately provided the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday Agreement was brokered.

During the course of the peace process, Gerry Adams led dyed in the wool republicans in directions they could never have imagined.

Back in 1986 he dropped Sinn Fein's policy of refusing to sit in the Irish parliament. In 1998, 90% of the party backed their president in taking seats in the new Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont - a remarkable piece of political management given Sinn Fein's "no return to Stormont" slogan in the 1997 general election campaign.

In October 2001 the IRA decommissioned some of its weapons, despite pledging earlier that "not a bullet and not an ounce" of explosives would be destroyed in response to British and unionist pressure.

In December 2004 Gerry Adams broke new ground by meeting Northern Ireland's Chief Constable Hugh Orde - a clear signal that republicans were considering supporting the police who they once regarded as "legitimate targets".

The meeting came as the IRA offered to destroy its entire arsenal, and pondered requests to allow this gesture to be photographed for posterity. All this would be done to usher in a once unthinkable agreement between Gerry Adams and his bette noire Ian Paisley.

Given the personal and political risks he has taken, Adams' leadership skills in navigating these sea changes in policy cannot be underestimated

Given the personal and political risks he has taken, Adams' leadership skills in navigating these sea changes in policy cannot be underestimated.

Historically disagreements between republicans led to violent feuding, but during the peace process major splits have largely been avoided.

Gerry Adams is always careful to use close supporters to test controversial ground in advance, ruthless in isolating and marginalising his opponents and far sighted in never allowing the swirl of events to knock the strategic direction of his "project" off course.

His chapter in Irish history is assured, although it's safe to predict that historians will be just as divided as Gerry Adams' contemporaries have been in their verdicts.