On Adams’s switch from Northern Ireland to the Dáil, De Bréadún noted: “He has never really settled into the political scene in the Republic and his grasp of the finer points of economic policy, for example, remains rather limited. The book - The Negotiators' Cookbook - was launched ahead of the festive season to raise money for Sinn Fein and Mr Adams said he had enjoyed writing it. On the hustings McGuinness came face to face with IRA victims, including the son of an Irish soldier the Provisionals had murdered who said in front of the TV cameras that the Sinn Féin deputy leader was not fit to be president of the nation. When he does finally go, the Sinn Féin politician most likely to take over from Adams will be the party’s deputy leader and Dublin TD, Mary Lou McDonald. With Michelle O’Neill the leader in Northern Ireland, the party once umbilically linked to the Provisional IRA and its armed campaign will not only be led by two women but also by a generation with no direct involvement in the Provisionals’ 30-year “war”. Adams was rearrested in July 1973 in Belfast and taken to the Maze, also known as Long Kesh idetention centre. On Christmas Eve 1973 he was one of four detainees caught attempting to break out. A hole had been cut in a perimeter fence and all four men were already out of the prison.

Adams told the officials that if the peace process collapsed, he would face a “hard decision” between trying to end the Troubles and staying loyal to his movement. In the 2000s the party campaigned against the Lisbon treaty and further EU expansion. It also argued for Ireland to leave the EU in the 1970s and 80s when Adams rose to hold the centre of power inside Sinn Féin.Instead, it is ageing ex-Servicemen in their 70s, 80s and 90s who have had to face the legal music under the arrangements that have obtained until now. The Government’s Bill rectifies this imbalance – and not before time. The DoJ said in 2021 that Adams was ineligible for compensation for a miscarriage of justice because it was the analysis of a legal point that led to the guilty verdicts being overturned, rather than a new or newly discovered fact. Padraic (Wilson), who was part of that team, starting bringing desserts. So what I have done is to put those recipes together here.

Martin” insisted the mainstream IRA killed Donaldson over his years of betrayal at the heart of the Irish republican movement.The use of the word has provoked a storm of controversy in Ireland and beyond but Adams initially insisted he was using the word ironically. His longstanding connection to the IRA’s violent “armed struggle” and his often poor performances in Dáil parliamentary debates continue to alienate vast sections of the Irish Republic’s middle class.

Adams said the bombing would undermine his efforts to obtain a visa for fundraising in the US, which was one of many “tactical reasons” for not wanting further violence.He told 1,000 delegates at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (annual conference) in Dublin on Saturday night that he and the late Martin McGuinness had recognised the need for a new change in leadership in the party. It said the convicted tax fraudster Thomas “Slab” Murphy, the jailed reputed leader of the IRA in South Armagh, personally asked the republican leadership that Donaldson be killed. He also published a book of tweets, My Little Book of Tweets, with Mercier Press in Cork in 2016, hoping to "show the lighter side of his personality and allow the reader some insight into his private life." He added that he would have been forced to override this – he would not have been able to tell people in advance because of his republicanism.”

Although he has a certain popular appeal as an icon of Irish republicanism, the more controversial aspects of his past are constantly highlighted by political opponents in the Republic. At a two-day internal conference in the Irish Republic, Adams told party activists he wanted to implement a “planned process of generational change”. For decades Adams has also denied allegations from former comrades that he was a senior IRA commander and member of its ruling body, the army council.

So the knowledge of my unlawful detention was known by the most senior level of the British system,” Adams said after the judgment.