Gerry Adams

Biography

Gerry Adams was born in Belfast's Ballymurphy district in 1948 into a strongly republican family. He attended St Finian's Primary School and St Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School, worked in bars, and became active in Irish republicanism in the late 1960s.

Interned in March 1972, he was released in June at the Provisional IRA's insistence to take part in its secret talks with William Whitelaw in London. He was arrested again in 1973 and held at the Maze, where he wrote for republican papers as 'Brownie', and in 1978 he became joint vice-president of Sinn Féin. He has always denied the frequent allegations that he was a member of the IRA leadership.

Elected MP for Belfast West in 1983, though he did not take his seat, he became Sinn Féin president that November, and in March 1984 survived being shot by UDA gunmen. In 1986 he persuaded the party to end its boycott of the Dáil. Secret talks with SDLP leader John Hume from 1988 led toward the 1994 IRA ceasefire and the negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Adams sat in the Northern Ireland Assembly from 1998 to 2010 and gave up his Westminster seat in 2011 to win a Dáil seat in Louth, which he held until 2020. In 2014 he was questioned for four days about the 1972 murder of Jean McConville and released without charge. He handed the Sinn Féin presidency to Mary Lou McDonald in February 2018.