Gerry Adams’ Status Shaken by IRA Bomb

BELFAST, Northern Ireland —  For more than half his life, Gerry Adams has been the leading figure of militant Irish nationalism.

Jailed by the British in the ‘70s, shot and nearly killed by a Protestant gunman in the ‘80s and retooled as a potential peace negotiator in the ‘90s, the man who has headed the stridently nationalist Sinn Fein political party for more than a decade was widely seen as having complete command of the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

No longer.

The IRA bomb that wreaked such havoc in London’s Docklands earlier this month also blew apart the long-held belief that Adams exerts ultimate control over both the shadowy urban guerrilla organization and its generation-old insurgency to wrest six Northern Ireland counties from British control.

In the aftermath of the attack, it seems increasingly clear that Adams--as he himself insists--had no prior knowledge that the IRA had abandoned his peace strategy, declared an end to its 17-month-old cease-fire and placed a massive bomb in an underground parking garage.

A week after the blast, which killed two and injured dozens, the IRA planted a second bomb in London’s theater district, but it was defused by police.

As the British and Irish governments struggle to pick up the pieces of the foundering Northern Ireland peace process, and President Clinton ponders a possible new U.S. role in the process he personally has helped broker, the man everyone believed they knew has suddenly become an enigma.

Exactly what is the Sinn Fein leader’s role? What are the limits of his power within the Irish republican movement? How badly have recent events diminished him?

The questions are crucially important, for if Adams cannot deliver the IRA into a negotiated settlement, then the process itself may be doomed.

*

“If he doesn’t have the influence, no one does; he’s still our best bet,” insisted a senior Irish government official in Dublin.

Some argue he’s their only bet.

U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith, in a statement she said reflected White House thinking, stated flatly: “Without Gerry Adams, there is no peace process.”

But on the key question of where Adams now stands with the IRA, some argue that not even Adams has the answer.

In an interview with the Belfast-based Irish News three days after the bombing, the Sinn Fein leader claimed that he had not yet spoken to any member of the IRA leadership.

The only certainty is that the incident has reduced his stature, at least temporarily.

“It’s clearly his biggest crisis,” admitted Donncha O’Hara, a Sinn Fein spokesman here.

Paul Bew, a professor of Irish politics at Belfast’s Queen’s University, sees the bombing as evidence of just how great a gap has opened between the IRA and Sinn Fein, the underground army’s legal political wing.

“It’s as if a company divided in two and the former chief executive was offered the job as chief messenger,” he said. “Adams has been very seriously diminished by this.”

While others agree that Adams has been damaged, they insist that he is far too central to the cause of militant nationalism to be shunted aside.

“It would be like the ANC [African National Congress] dumping [Nelson] Mandela,” commented one source who knows both Adams and the republican movement well but who declined to be identified by name. “He’s a real hero figure.”

There is little doubt that Adams commands an almost reverential following within Sinn Fein, in part because he is “one of them”--a working-class Roman Catholic, born and raised in the Falls Road area of Belfast, a district long renowned as a hotbed of nationalist militancy.

Although his father was shot and wounded by police during a republican protest in the 1940s and his mother came from a family of activists, Adams says academics, not politics, were stressed at home.

*

His political baptism came in 1964 at age 16 in Belfast, when he experienced street riots resulting from the police trashing a building that had flown the Irish tricolor.

He began folding envelopes at a Sinn Fein office, but, according to those who know him, it was the whiff of social change in student revolutions of 1968--and the lyrics of Bob Dylan and the Beatles--that led him to join the Irish national struggle when it turned violent in 1969.

*

Although he has always denied direct involvement with the IRA, Adams is believed to have held a battalion-level command in Belfast in the early 1970s and been intimately involved in planning the infamous Bloody Friday in July 1972, when a series of nearly 30 bombs exploded in the Northern Ireland capital, killing 11 and injuring countless others.

“ ‘Gerry Adams’ are the two most hated words in these islands,” the London tabloid the Sun once declared in a statement that seemed to capture the British view of the man as well as the central nature of his role.

Although tough and ruthless, Adams is also much more. He is a skilled orator with sharp political instincts and the charisma of a natural leader.

Ken Newell, one of several Protestant clergymen who met with Adams secretly more than a dozen times between 1990 and 1993 in what are believed to have been the Sinn Fein leader’s first ventures across the sectarian divide, recalled how Adams’ followers treated him with a sense of awe.

“He moved like a bishop with his people,” Newell said. “Completely relaxed. He was the most prominent republican in the room, but he didn’t stand on any platform.”

Adams was jailed twice in the 1970s. During his second stint, in 1974-77, he used the time to reorganize the IRA from an unwieldy, easily infiltrated underground movement into the series of disciplined, tightly organized cells that exist today.

He also transformed Sinn Fein from a ragtag IRA propaganda arm into a legitimate political party, and he nearly paid with his life when he was shot in the neck in 1984 by a Protestant gunman in Belfast.

Those who know him well say that, during the second half of the 1980s, Adams gradually concluded that a peaceful settlement of the Northern Ireland problem stood a better chance of success than continued violence.

Over a prolonged period, he persuaded the IRA leadership to give negotiations a chance, and in August 1994 the IRA announced a cease-fire.

But instead of talking, the participants deadlocked almost immediately on the issue of whether the IRA should disarm before negotiations or after a settlement was reached.

As the months of stalemate dragged on, IRA leaders--by definition marginalized by the cease-fire--gradually lost patience with the lack of progress.

*

Observers here speculate that the IRA leaders may have deliberately kept Adams in the dark about the London bomb to preserve his ability to deny knowledge of it.

“I take it as a good sign he wasn’t informed,” claimed one source familiar with IRA thinking. “If they [IRA leaders] were cutting all ties to the peace process, I think they’d have gone to him and said his game was over. By not telling him, he can stay in the political game.”

Whether Adams can talk the IRA into a second cease-fire remains unclear, but he has implied he won’t even try until the British and Irish governments offer some clear vision--and timetable--of the way forward.

“It would be pointless for me to go to the IRA and ask them to do something that the answer would be no,” he said last week in response to a question about why he didn’t impose a new cease-fire immediately.

Meanwhile, the people of Northern Ireland wait, hoping that Adams can reimpose his will.

“Every day without a bomb is a hint that he’s restoring control, getting through to them,” Newell said.

Marshall was recently on assignment in Belfast. Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.