FROM THE CONFESSIONAL TO THE PEACE TABLE

Kevin Myers once heard Gerry Adams order someone to be shot.

That's as good a basis as any for an assessment of the man behind the year-long ceasefire in Northern Ireland

Dublin THE SCENE is a pub in Andersonstown some 22 years ago. A man in his mid-fifties wearing a wig is at a urinal. Another man enters the men's room and merrily whisks the bewigged one's wig off. The dewigged turns and attacks the dewigger. The dewig- ger loses an eye in the melee. His eye is there on the ground, gouged out in the frenzy of the revenge attack.

This is the same man who has been feted around the world, who in New York was called one of the greatest statesmen ever to visit America, and whose volume of prison memoirs was recently published in France — Sur la Route de Belfast: Camets de Prison.

For much of his adult life, Gerry Adams has probably issued orders such as the one he gave outside that Belfast pub many years ago. His background was of the Mass-going Catholic republican culture which had flowed through west Belfast for the last four decades or more. His father had been in the IRA and had been a col- league of Tom Williams, the last IRA man executed in Northern Ireland (for killing a policeman). Adams joined the junior IRA at 15, was married at 20 and was a daily communicant. He has shielded his wife and their children sedulously from publicity even as he has become the most famous Irishman in the world.

But to have lived in the city in which Gerry Adams was a military boss was to know fear. He and his loyalist counterparts crushed the life and soul out of the place. Belfast died a death as complete as any- thing Europe has seen this side of Enver Hoxha's Tirane. All city-centre pubs and restaurants closed after six o'clock, its light- less streets deserted except by amnesiac winos and the hopelessly forlorn; the city which Gerry Adams and his friends and his enemies designed was a dead zone. When he was captured and interned, others con- tinued his good work.

The IRA that he joined was initially a mightily Catholic IRA, its elderly leaders all daily communicants. This was the gener- ation of men who had refused to use con- doms to make timing devices during the bombing campaign in Britain in 1939. One of the very first targets for their bombs in 1971 was Belfast's only strip club, and in 1973 in Armagh women's jail, masturbation amongst IRA women prisoners was prohib- ited by their commanding officer because it was 'unrepublican'.

These new left-wing Provos were intelligent but limited, both ghet- toised and yet cos- Blame capitalism was their battle cry. Adams himself was not initially a believer in this liberation stuff, but his associates who did believe were the coming faction in the IRA, and he picked up much of the ter- minology. The old crowd, with their queru- lous theological ramblings that the Provisional IRA was the only lawful army in Ireland, simply irritated the new men who had other things in mind, the first for most of them being sex. The second was maybe dope. The third was, Brits out by hook or by crook. They were young and fit and full of hormones. They took control of the IRA and abandoned the rosary culture of the old guard.

And now these once young and spunky gunslingers are paunchy and middle-aged and not so full of hormones. Behind them lies the wasteland of their lives, and the generation they led to war, who squan- dered their youth in prisons, whose past is strewn with the dead they have slain and the corpses of their colleagues. Most of them, whatever the hijinks of their youth, are still Catholic communicants. Most of them have the full emotional and intellec- tual equipment of any human being: could they bear to put up with another quarter century of war? The middle-aged hearts and the middle-aged consciences of many of them apparently said no.

Adams has been the man most responsi- ble for this, though he could not have done it without Martin McGuinness. Even with his military background, Adams is still regarded by the foot soldiers of the IRA as a politician. They hate politicians, not least because politicians listen to what people say, and the culture of an unanswerable military elite is very strong within the IRA.

This is where McGuinness comes in. Though he was in the famous talks with the British in 1972, a dimpled little butcher's boy plucked from his Bogside fastness and flown to England, he was, and is, primarily IRA. He has seen action many times against the British army. But McGuinness's power base was the western walled city of Derry. He was in jail only once, in the Republic. He was cut off from the main- stream of IRA politics, in which the Maze was both a Camberley and a party central office.

Adams had spent nearly five years in the Maze after his arrest in 1973. He emerged fully educated in the new lore, language and logistics of the IRA. But that IRA, for all its vigorous rejection of rosary republicanism, still marched to remembered tribal drums, as witnessed during the calamitous hunger strikes of 1981. The deaths of ten hunger-strikers not merely convulsed Catholic Northern Ireland, intensifying the victim culture which is never very far away from republi- canism, but had a profound personal effect on the IRA leadership.

After the hunger strikes, Adams and his fellow IRA leaders were doubly convinced that henceforward the end justified the means. They talked to one another, were visited by revolutionary tourists from all over the world, and were reassured — their war was right, no matter what extremes they visited.

Never mind the transparent idiocy of this — nationalists were a minority in Northern Ireland, and the provos a minority within a minority. No matter what damage the IRA did, it could not militarily transform the demographic truth of that minority status. But lost in their hallucinogenic world of militaristic fantasy, they intensified their campaign.

They visited the war on Britain. The Cabinet was nearly annihilated in the Brighton bombing of 1983. They slaugh- tered cavalrymen trotting their mounts through Hyde Park. Bandsmen oompahing on a bandstand were blown to pieces. And when soldiers became increasingly difficult to kill in Northern Ireland, they widened the category of legitimate target to include anybody who sold vegetables to policemen.

Adams himself was elected Westminster MP for West Belfast. This was a disaster for British government policy. It was in response to the evidence of this increasing alienation amongst nationalists that Lon- don responded to the approaches of Dublin and agreed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of ten years ago. Effectively, Lon- don had declared an end to any selfish British strategic interest in Northern Ire- land. To the half-intelligent, there was no more war to be fought. The rest would be politics.

The animals came in 4 x 4s.'

Gerry Adams probably understood this, but the IRA inhabited an insane militaristic landscape in which anything was possible if you applied enough military pressure. Kill enough and you will get your way. That there was no causal connection between their means and their preferred end escaped the understanding of the mili- tarists. Still the bombings continued. Twice the City of London was devastated, yet still, mysteriously, no united Ireland was in sight. No matter how big the bangs, victory moved no closer. Bombers mixed their chemicals like mad alchemists hoping to turn base metals into gold, and with the same bewildering sense of futility.

Gerry Adams realised that these bloody experiments were achieving nothing. He had begun secret talks with the constitu- tional nationalist leader, John Hume, who took the perilous path of trying to persuade Adams of the folly of violence. It was a brave decision, condemned by many peo- ple, yet the argument had to begin some- where. John Hume urged Adams to realise that you cannot get what you want by mili- tary means. Nationalists are not trans- formed into unionists by unionist gunmen, are they? So can the reverse be true? Can it? Can it?

It is not a profound point, maybe, but it was to an a republican militarist, for whom the gun is not merely the means, but also the end itself. It is not sufficient, in other words, to get a united Ireland, but it must be done by violent means.

And here we come to another aspect of Gerry Adams which is difficult for out- siders to understand. It is his conscience: how can he do and countenance the things he does? Well, the simple answer to that is that he doesn't have to. He doesn't do those things, the IRA does them. The IRA is sanctioned by history, and, if it makes mistakes, then who does not in war? With dreary regularity IRA supporters after an IRA atrocity will refer you to Dresden, Hamburg. And if an individual IRA man has a problem with his conscience, there are reliable priests, informal IRA chap- lains, who will hear their confession and give them absolution — and only a Catholic knows the astonishing uplift derived from a solid confession.

Possibly that kind of absolution only goes so far: one of the essential ingredients of a good confession is what Catholics call a firm purpose of amendment, namely the resolution not to repeat a sin. Could Gerry Adams be said in the eyes of God to have had a firm purpose of amendment? A younger man might be able to ignore the fine print about amending one's ways; men over 45 tend to read it closely and worry about its implications.

Conscience could consort with common- sense. Adams is intelligent, and reads wide- ly. He realised that the IRA was politically too insubstantial to make an impact on the politics of Northern Ireland. To do that it must mobilise non-violent nationalist Ire- land; and it could only do that by laying down the gun.

This was a difficult strategy. Only a man with sound military credentials could have persuaded the gunmen that the time to put away the gun had arrived — put it away, not give it away. Caching arms is what Irish insurgents have been doing since pikes were laid in roof thatches in the 18th cen- tury. Caching guns is a perfectly acceptable republican practice — surrendering them is betrayal. Even to remove a gun from an IRA cache without authorisation is a capi- tal offence in republican circles.

Adams talked the IRA into caching their guns. It was a major achievement. Thus the ceasefire, precisely one year ago; and since then he has managed to weld a consensus which embraces much of nationalist Ire- land, and, it seems, the US State Depart- ment. He even felt able last weekend to call on the Irish government to 'face up to the British Government' on the issue of 'decommissioning' IRA guns.

Lots of agile brains are working on this one, but there are limits to what agile brains can do. On the issue of IRA guns, we have reached them. The unionists and the British say 'no talks' while Sinn Fein is welded to the IRA military machine. Even if the British capitulate on this — and I don't think they will — the unionists will not. There can be no all-party talks without unionist involvement. Gerry Adams can assemble whatever alliance of Irish nation- alists and foreign potentates he likes; it will make no difference to the unionists — they are back inside their Protestant fortress again, seeking a new leader to replace James Molyneaux, and glaring out, as they always have.

This the dilemma faced by Gerry Adams, who I genuinely believe has made his per- sonal journey away from the gun. But he is still bound by the culture and military habits of the IRA. He can only go so far on the road to peaceful means before feeling the gravitational pull of the gun —when he no longer feels it, then he is no longer in the IRA. His main influence lies within the magnetic orbit of gunmetal.

The ceasefire, admittedly, has lasted longer than many — including myself — thought it would. Yes, and people have been revelling in the peace; but there are disturbing sings that it is fraying at the edges. Attacks on Orange halls and on nationalist football clubs have been widespread; as scores of men with broken knees and elbows can testify, and as Gerry Adams reminded us the other day, 'the IRA has not gone away'. It is still there, still armed. It will not disarm. And union- ists will not talk to its Sinn Fein surrogates while the guns are in place.

For the time being, Gerry Adams retains the trust of the IRA leadership. But younger men inside the IRA are becoming impatient. They want some return for a year of peace. Ultimately, Gerry Adams is disposable; yet there is nobody of any stature whatsoever to do a Brutus on him.

So Sinn Fein-IRA are discovering how slow and unrewarding conventional politics can be when you are in a minority. Far from moving a single inch towards a united Ireland in the past year of peace, they find that the unionists can be neither induced nor compelled to join them for talks. In the IRA world of command and obedience, the behaviour of free people is baffling.

A year ago, Gerry Adams justified the start of the 25-year IRA campaign of ter- rorism by saying that without it 'we would still be treated like second-class, subhu- man, undignified human beings'. It is a falsehood to say that the war was about respect. It was not. It was a war to cause the British to leave, regardless of unionist opinion on the matter. Unionists have not changed their minds, nor, I suspect, have Mr Adams's colleagues in the IRA, on the reasons for the war. Most people in North- ern Ireland are pessimistic about the long- term prospects for peace. I trust they are wrong; I fear, however, that they are right.

Kevin Myers is a columnist on the Irish Times.