It was noteworthy, if not stop-the-presses stuff. Gerry Adams–the long-time leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army–is stepping down. Now 69, Adams has long been a high-profile advocate for “democratic socialism” and an end to the political partition of the island of Ireland. He has led Sinn Fein for more than 30 years.
And during that time–1995 to be exact–he visited Tampa as part of his barnstorming American tour to raise awareness and money. I heard his history-heavy talk at the University of Tampa, and later caught his more activist, emotional approach at a fund-raiser at Four Green Fields Irish pub.
The latter was more entertaining. Pubs guarantee it. Adams was both wry and emphatic. He talked about the Good Friday peace accord and the shared-power experiment in self-government as merely part of a process. It was a “short-term, strategic goal” he told the crowd.
That’s because unification with the Republic of Ireland remained unwaveringly the “long-term” goal. And Adams made it clear that “long” was, in short, not all that long as demographic patterns continued to favor Northern Ireland’s Catholic population. A Catholic majority was not much more than a generation or two away, if that, he underscored. So why resort to violence when demographic inevitability can carry out your agenda?
“Peace is not just the absence of violence,” he told his beer-quaffing audience. “It’s also justice. Irish unity will manifest itself in whatever society people want.”
It went over well with the Guinness crowd.