Gerry Adams: Barman To Political Operator
Updated: 2:15pm UK, Thursday 01 May 2014
Gerry Adams has been president of Sinn Fein since 1983 and has always denied membership of the IRA.
But he defended its gunmen for a substantial period of the bloody conflict in Northern Ireland.
A hate figure in 1980s Britain, he was banned from speaking on British television and radio in October 1988.
It meant viewers and listeners could not hear his voice, but that of an actor's instead, reading from a transcript.
The prison hunger strikes of 1981, during which one of the inmates, the IRA's former commanding officer Bobby Sands was elected as MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, prompted Sinn Fein - and Mr Adams - to move towards electoral politics.
In 1980 he said: "The British realise there can be no military victory. It is time that republicans realised there can be no military victory."
And he described the 1984 Grand Hotel, Brighton bombing at the Tory Party conference - which nearly killed Margaret Thatcher - as "a blow for democracy".
He said Sands' election "exposed the lie that the hunger strikers - and by extension the IRA and the whole republican movement - had no popular support".
He himself was elected to the British Parliament in 1983 as MP for Belfast West.
However, he refused to take his seat in the House of Commons - and again when he was re-elected in the same constituency in 1997.
Former Conservative Prime Minister John Major once said the thought of sitting down with him "turned his stomach".
The voice ban was lifted in September 1994, two weeks after the first ceasefire was announced by the Provisional IRA, which Mr Adams helped broker.
As head of the political wing of the IRA, Mr Adams was a key player in the peace process, which concluded with the Belfast Agreement, signed on Good Friday in 1998.
President Bill Clinton invited Mr Adams to the White House for St Patrick's Day celebrations in 1995.
And Mr Adams made history by visiting 10 Downing Street at the invitation of the Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The peace deal largely ended three decades of violence between republican paramilitaries seeking union with Ireland and mainly loyalist paramilitaries, who wanted to maintain Northern Ireland's position as a part of the UK.
It also paved the way for an end to the IRA's armed campaign in 2005 when it pledged to dump its arms and commit to a political solution which culminated with a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland.
Since the Good Friday Agreement Mr Adams is now widely regarded a statesman, and has also written 13 books.
In 2010 he resigned his Westminster seat and has since represented County Louth in the Irish parliament.
He was born on October 6, 1948, in Belfast to parents who came from republican backgrounds.
After finishing school he worked as barman before he became interested in politics and civil rights and got involved in the Irish republican movement, joining Sinn Fein in 1964, and surviving an assassination attempt in 1984 by the loyalist paramilitary UDA.
He married his wife Collette in 1971 with whom he has a son, Gerald.
His brother Liam was sentenced last year to 16 years in prison for raping his daughter Aine Tyrell - who waived her right to anonymity - when she was a child.
Shortly after she made the allegations public in a 2009 television documentary, Gerry Adams revealed that his father, also called Gerry, a veteran IRA man, had physically and sexually assaulted members of the family.
The Sinn Fein leader has rejected claims he was involved in the 1972 murder of widowed mother-of-10 Jean McConville as "malicious".
He has been implicated by two republicans - former IRA commander Brendan Hughes and Old Bailey bomber Dolours Price - in taped interviews they gave before their deaths to a research project at Boston College in the United States.
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