West Belfast Sinn Féin Sinn Féin -- Building an Ireland of Equals

Gerry Adams MP

Gerry Adams was born in October 1948 and grew up in the Ballymurphy district of West Belfast. He became involved in the civil rights campaign in the late 1960s and was active in campaigns around bad housing and equal rights.

He was interned without trial by the British in 1972. In July 1972 he was released to participate in secret talks in London between Irish republicans and the British government.

After his re-arrest in 1973 he tried to escape from Long Kesh Prison Camp. For this he was imprisoned and eventually released in 1976. In 1978 he was again arrested and imprisoned for alleged IRA membership and was held in the H Blocks of Long Kesh. The charges were dismissed.

Gerry Adams played a leading role in the campaign for political status. He was central to the formation of Sinn Fein's electoral strategy and to its reorganisation. In 1982 he topped the poll in West Belfast in the Assembly elections.

In December of the same year he was banned by British Home Secretary William Whitelaw, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, from entering Britain. The ban was lifted in June 1983 when he was elected MP for West Belfast.

In 1983 he was also elected President of Sinn Fein.

In 1984 he was shot and seriously wounded by a loyalist death squad working in collusion with the RUC Special Branch.

Gerry Adams won the west Belfast seat again in 1988 but lost it briefly to the SDLP in 1991.

In 1997, in 2001 and again in 2005 he was re-elected as MP for West Belfast. In 1998 he was elected to the Assembly and re-elected in 2003 and 2007.

In 1987 Gerry Adams was instrumental in launching the party's current peace strategy.

In 1993 it emerged that Gerry Adams had been holding a series of private meetings with the leader of the SDLP, John Hume. From these meetings both leaders agreed a joint position which was to become the Irish peace initiative.

In 1994 his efforts and that of the party leadership persuaded the IRA to call a cessation of all military actions and although this broke down for a time, after its reinstatement all-party talks successfully led in April 1998 to the Good Friday Agreement.

However, the decade after the Agreement was fraught with many difficulties as Gerry Adams and others sought to have its terms implemented. There was considerable opposition from sections of unionism and the British state, particularly its military and intelligence system.

In January 2007 Sinn Fein at a special Ard Fheis agreed to engage with the new policing structures.

In March 2007 Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley agreed a deal which a few months later saw the political institutions restored.

The power sharing Executive has agreed a Programme for Government, a Budget and an Investment Strategy, and the all-Ireland political institutions are up and running.

Of course there remains much work still to be done, both in implementing outstanding aspects of the Good Friday Agreement and in achieving the republican goals of reunification of Ireland and ending British jurisdiction on this island.

Gerry Adams has played a key role in the peace process and has travelled widely to advance the peace process, particularly in the United States, Britain and South Africa. He has also campaigned on issues of human rights and justice, including the demand for the cancellation of world debt.

A member of PEN, the international guild of writers, Gerry Adams is also a published writer with 14 books to his credit, a mixture of fact and fiction including his autobiographies, ''Before the Dawn'' and ''Hope and History''. He is an occasional columnist in Irish and British newspapers.

On November 16 2010, Gerry Adams announced that is to step down from the Assembly in order to seek Sinn Féin's nomination to contest the Louth Dáil seat. Pat Sheehan was selected by West Belfast Sinn Féin to take his place in the Assembly.

Gerry Adams is to resign as MP for West Belfast when the Taoiseach announces the General Election.