Date: 12.25.2000
"I don't think my persuasive powers are so great," says the controversial Northern Irish political leader Gerry Adams, 51, who is visiting New York City from Belfast. Isn't he too modest? Adams convinced the Irish Republican Army, whose raison d'être is war against the British, to put away its guns. He helped persuade the British to give peace a chance. The result is a tenuous truce that has held since 1998. "I've seen Adams walk into a room where 95% of the people are against him, and after an hour, 95% of the people are for him," says Niall O'Dowd, publisher of Irish America magazine and a player in the peace process himself.
Gerry Adams is many things to many people. As head of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, he is feared for his close connection to a deadly guerrilla army. But he is also revered in the Republic of Ireland and among knowledgeable Irish-Americans for bringing peace to the bloodstained North. What better person to speak of negotiation skills? We ask him his secret. "I don't have a calibrated marketing plan," Adams says humorously, "I have a story to tell." Right. Adams is a revolutionary, not a college management professor.
Adams grew up in a household of ten children in Belfast and dropped out of school when he was 16 shortly before Ireland's more recent troubles began. Although no proof exists, it is widely believed that Adams rose quickly to a high position in the IRA, proving himself a brilliant tactician and a natural leader. Though never convicted of a crime, Adams was sent to prison for four years, during which time he was routinely beaten. "I have always sought a political solution to problems. People only engage in an armed struggle when there is no alternative," Adams says, while not commenting on his direct involvement with the IRA.
But he has known violence. In 1988 Adams came home one evening to find there was an assassination attempt on his wife and child. Many of his close friends have been killed over the years. "You'd be talking to them in a restaurant, and three minutes later you would find they were killed." In 1985 Adams was shot five times in one attempt on his life. He takes precautions changing the choice of a location for our appointment twice, for example. The Secret Service is assigned to him in the U.S., and he never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row here or in Ireland.
From his latest bed in New York, however, Adams seems well rested. He good-naturedly offers us a few tips sure to be handy when negotiating a cease-fire or perhaps a pay raise.
Tip one is very simple: "Don't give up." Did he ever come close? Adams shakes his head, no. In 1996 an IRA bomb in London's Docklands killed two, inflicted massive property damage and set back peace efforts. At the time Adams quietly confided to a friend that he still thought he could turn the situation around. He did. Another cease-fire was called. "There are times when it is very depressing," he says, "but I have remained single-minded." Look, he says, at South Africa's Nelson Mandela: "Mandela never became wishy-washy or changed his principles. Yet he could be generous and forgiving." Adams often relates the struggle of Catholics in Northern Ireland to that of the American civil rights movement.
Tip two: "You must learn to control yourself. Anger can be useful, but hatred can destroy." Could he forgive his would-be assassins of 1985? "Let me tell you a story. A few weeks back I was attending a meeting with the Ulster Unionists the party of the Protestant majority when one of our men recognized the British security guard as one of the group who had beat me senseless in the 1970s." Adams went to him, shook his hand and said, "'You won't be doing it again, will you?'" Adams explains: "It was a comfort to the security guard, but it was also a comfort to me. You only diminish yourself when you are captive to hatred." David Trimble, the first minister of Northern Ireland's new power-sharing government (and winner, with John Hume, of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998), still refuses to shake Adams' hand. "I offered to hug David Trimble," says Adams, smiling but making a serious point.
Despite his reputation as dark, brooding and enigmatic, Adams has a way of being warm, physically demonstrative and funny. Adams says: "Most people think of us as criminals, up to our elbows in blood. It helps when they meet us and see that we don't have horns." How would you describe yourself? "If I were to write a personal ad? Hmmm. It would say: Fun-loving guy seeks peace." His third tip on negotiation: "The quality that any aspiring revolutionary must have is patience," says Adams. Convincing the IRA to move away from violence a feat that took years is still a continuing challenge. Through it all, Adams waited, heard the hard-liners out, then brought them back to reality time and again.
How does he maintain patience? "I listen to music," he says. He has a large collection of American blues. "You try to realize that you're just a little dot in the universe. When I was in Ireland last week, I came upon a man looking up at the moon. I asked what he was doing, and he said, 'I was making sure the mountain's all right.' " The mountain is fine, but the fragile peace agreement is now testing the patience of all involved. Trimble is trying to ban Sinn Fein representatives from participating in the North-South cogoverning body unless the IRA begins to decommission by June. The IRA is not about to agree.
The day before our interview, Adams met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Adams' view is that while Blair and the British are intellectually interested in keeping the cease-fire and establishing a power-sharing government, they are not fully committed. "Unfortunately Britain will say, 'Oh, there's a few hundred terrorists, we'll just go in and mop it up.' That would be a huge mistake," warns our fun-loving guy.
When asked whether he has sold out in making peace with the British, as some think he has, his answer is ornery: "Not yet," he says, adding, "We'll prevail. The back-of-the-bus days are over." Getting up to go, he says, "I leave you in peace." We hope so.
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