Date: 2009-11-17
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MADISON, NJ -- Gerry Adams, best known for helping bring peace to Northern Ireland, urged Irish-Americans to lobby for a reunified Ireland to complete the process and provide war-ravaged areas throughout the world a model for resolving conflicts.
(Media-Newswire.com) - MADISON, NJ -- Gerry Adams, best known for helping bring peace to Northern Ireland, urged Irish-Americans to lobby for a reunified Ireland to complete the process and provide war-ravaged areas throughout the world a model for resolving conflicts.
Speaking at Drew on Nov. 5, the 61-year-old Adams said Irish-Americans played “a pivotal role” in creating the 1998 power-sharing agreement that ended nearly three decades violence known as the “Troubles.”
But many provisions of the Good Friday Agreement remain “unfinished business,” such as transferring control of the courts and police from London to Belfast, Adams said. If left to the British government, the agreement’s full implementation would be delayed and diluted, he said.
“It needs someone from the outside to encourage progress,” said Adams, president of Sinn Féin, now the largest political party in Northern Ireland. “We need you. We need America, We need Irish America.”
A soft-spoken Adams gave the audience at Drew’s Dorothy Young Center for the Arts a brief history on how Britain divided six counties from the rest of Ireland in 1921 and how laws and institutions discriminated against Catholics. The injustices “were entirely a consequence of colonialism,” he said.
In the 1960s, Adams joined a civil rights movement fashioned after the one in the U.S. But by 1969, British troops occupied Northern Ireland and violence – committed by the military, loyalist groups and the Irish Republican Army – was on the rise. In the 1970s, Adams was twice jailed _ once for four years - under a law allowing authorities to detain anyone suspected of terrorism indefinitely without trial.
Adams’ serious talk offered light moments. Asked what it was like being shot five times in 1984, Adams answered, “the first one was …OK,” then added, “I was blessed with very incompetent assassins.”
Former Gov. Brendan Byrne, 85, asked Adams if he would see a unified Ireland in his lifetime. “Keep living and you’ll see,” he quipped. But Adams was serious when he said his life’s goal, one Ireland, remains “doable.”
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