What is your earliest memory, Gerry?
I have a vague memory of a tenement house and being with my mother and someone knocking loudly at the front door and then my immediate memory after that is my first day at school and being slapped. When my mother and father were first married they got two rooms in a tenenment place in Greencastle just outside Belfast and I went to a school called Star of the Sea and then we moved back with my Granny in Ballymurphy.

You left school after completing the GCE and became a barman. Was there any question you might go to college or was it just assumed you’d go to work?
I actually disappointed my parents very much. At the time, they brought in the 1947 education act which is actually credited with educating everyone from John Hume to Seamus Heaney to Bernadette McAliskey to Eamon McCann, all of those people who came on to form leadership of some kind of another in different spheres in the north.

I failed my 11-plus at the first attempt, got it the second attempt and went to St Mary’s Grammar School. It was quite a big sacrifice, there were ten survivors in my family, three of my little brothers died at birth, my father was a builder’s labourer and my mother was a mill worker so it was a big sacrifice for them to put me through school.

Their notion was that I would stay at that. I spent a lot of time with my Granny Adams. But the civil rights thing started, 1964 was the Divis Street riots, the school I went to was along that route, I was 16 and I had become caught up in what was happening.

Was it inevitable that you got caught up in it, given the political connections of your parents and your grandparents or were you just influenced by what was going on around you?
Well it’s hard to know to be honest, it’s hard to know. Before 1964 there wasn’t a lot happening politically. The IRA border campaign had not long ended, it hadn’t really impacted in Belfast. I was too young to remember anything about it.

Republicans were reorganising, this might be arrogant but my general notion was that most people’s heads were down, there was a lot of poverty about, unemployment, it was about survival. It was almost a new generation like I said, the Bernadettes were coming up, the other people to a lesser degree like myself who maybe had a higher expectation.

So maybe it was inevitable, but certainly I have to say I was still learning about my own republican family history up to a few years ago so arguably what was happening around me is what compelled me to become politically active as opposed to my family history.

Did your brothers and sisters get involved in politics too?
All the male members of my family were interned along with uncles and cousins and my two oldest sisters are very politically active and not in Sinn Fein for that matter. So I suppose in a way we were a family who were politically very aware.

Did you see the film ‘Hunger’ about Bobby Sands?
I do intend to watch it but I consciously have not done so thus far because of the experience of some of my friends who are also former political prisoners, including one former hunger striker. He was watching a dvd of the film but he turned it off when his son came in. Another, not a former prisoner sat down one Friday night with a few beers and couldn’t finish either the film or the beers. That’s the story everyone tells me about ‘Hunger’. So by all accounts I want to be in the right mood with a bit of space to myself before I watch it.

What is your reaction to the recent events in the North
They will not bring down the peace process. They will and have brought enormous grief to bereaved families and made many people afraid when they thought fear of violent death was a thing of the past. Sinn Féin have sent a very robust and clear message to the perpetrators, most notably from Martin McGuinness, that they have no support from republicans. There is no space for anyone to engage in violent actions. Those days are over and as Peter Robinson and I said in the Northern Assembly there is no turning back.

The maze prison has been in the news recently. What do you think should happen to it?
The agreement of the all-party group who looked at it was that the site be developed, it’s quite a large site, and that some of the prison buildings be retained. There was an agreement that a multi-purpose sports stadium might be built there, the DUP minister has scuppered that, some elements of unionism probably realise that the retention of the prison building the interest will be in the hunger strikers.

We have no intention of it ever becoming a shrine, the fact is that the site should be developed. It could become the engine for construction jobs. Arguably, given the success of the peace process, you could have a conflict resolution or a centre of that kind on that site. Because internationally people are coming to the north to learn about what went on, from all over the world, we would have a very clear focus on the need to develop it but not in a partisan way.

Are you a spiritual person?
I try to be. I do go to Mass I suppose for a number of reasons. I am not worried about anyone who doesn’t. I have a very busy lifestyle. I like the notion of for an hour just taking that wee bit of time out, you can be on your own even though you are in a community, you are in a wee bubble. Often, there is as much a sense of spiritual oneness if you can get out in the country or walk and get a wee bit of focus on things other than the immediate material things.

Do you read much?
I used to describe myself as a binge reader. I collect books, I pick them up almost like a pick-pocket and I would binge read. For the past year I’ve been very good. I’ve been reading constantly every night, sometimes just for ten minutes before I go to sleep. I’ve read all the contemporary stuff, Joe O’Connor, big fan of Niall Williams, just finished John Boyne’s ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’. Stuggs Turkle died a couple of months ago and I’ve started reading his books.

I also like reading broadly political stuff as opposed to polemic. Recently, I had a stream of reading. I read Hilary Clinton’s book and she mentioned Harriet Tubman, a woman who escaped from slavery and ran what they called the railroad so I then went and dug out her book and then I went and got Uncle Tom’s Cabin which I hadn’t read since I was a child and then I got Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams of My Father’, so a stream of stuff.

When are you happiest?
I am a good early morning person. I am quite grumpy at ten o’clock at night, some would say I am grumpy a lot of the time. We have two granddaughters, they are absoloutely terrific. I tend not to talk about my family at all at all so I suppose I am happiest when I am with them. Teresa is 9 and Luisne was 4 yesterday. I love walking, I write a wee bit so I have plenty to do. I sometimes go on a high if I get a really good walk on my own on a beach or coming off a hill. I have two dogs with me as I am coming back, I end up singing.

What makes you sad?
I suppose when I am feeling sorry for myself. (laughs). When I see things happening to other people I tend to get a bit angry and for what it’s worth I think it’s good to cultivate a sense of outrage without being self-righteous. There are a lot of things happening which shouldn’t be.

What characteristics do you dislike in other people?
I don’t really know. One of the things I used to get an ironic resentment at was when you are somewhere on your own business and a person comes up and says “just the man I wanted to see.” When they haven’t taken the bother to phone the office or go through the right channels, they just come up to you on your day out.

I think people are great you know, we all have so many eccentricities and just to chronicle it all, it’s quite amusing. I suppose what I dislike is what probably informs or underpins my politics. Without being too political I listened to the Taoiseach making a very fine speech recently about people having to drop their living standards by 10 or 12 per cent and I said to myself now that’s O.K. except if you are a PAYE worker or a single parent or if you are on the dole. You can certainly afford it if you are the head of the ESB. So things like that I would resent but it’s more politically rather than they would be about people.

What about your own characteristics that you don’t like?
What do I dislike about myself? I suppose because I am so nice. (laughs). That’s a very hard question to answer.
Let me put it like this. What would you change about yourself? I would like if I could carve out a bit more space for myself. Also, I’ve no doubt that if I get something in my head, it’s very hard to shift me from it. But I am a sort of an a-la-carte Catholic Buddhist Druid. Somewhere in there I am trying to come to terms with life and what it means and how I can change myself to be a better person in the middle of it all.

What is your greatest strength?
I don’t know, these are all cliches but I firmly believe in positive thinking I don’t have any time for negative energy, I think it’s really a waste. I think whatever energy you have you should use it in a positive way. I also believe that people have to be imbued by a sense of being able to make a difference in their own lives in their community’s life and how society is shaped. The older I get and the more I continue with political activism the more I am reinforced in that belief and if that’s a strength, that would be mine.

What’s your greatest regret?
If you didn’t have regrets you couldn’t continue to be politically active especially in the business we are in. We are trying to bring about the maximum amount of change possible. In the course of doing that you have to remotivate yourself fairly often and review where you are and so I would have regrets that I didn’t do the right things at different times or the right things soon enough. But generally speaking in terms of being positive about life and the future I tend to mark these down and try not to do these things again. I don’t sit up all night worrying about it. I don’t become despondent about these things.

When you say “the right things at the right times” what do you mean?
I wrote a book and in the course of doing the research for it I discovered that, for example, I got out of prison around 1977 and started a process of opening up dialogue to see if conflict could be brought to an end or some alternative means could be found to achieve republican objectives. And in the course of doing the research I discovered that some of that took fifteen years, it took that long to get to the meeting with John Hume which wasn’t John Hume’s fault. I used to say to myself when we got initiatives going which have now been quite groundbreaking in terms of the shape of things on the island why couldn’t it have happened in 1972 or 1976– then you have to be philosophical that there are convergences of personalities and events and there are tides in the affairs of men that come together at the right time and you always have to judge events in their own time.

Do you take a drink, Gerry?
I do but I stopped after Christmas and I am not going to drink until Easter. I just decided.

How friendly are you with Ian Paisley?
I don’t see him that often, he is now retired as a leader and isn’t around the assembly. When I do see him he is very friendly, very honourable and respectful and very good humoured and basically what you saw on ‘The Late Late Show’ is what you get. I think he did the right thing and did it with some grace and I think it was important that he was the First Minister for the year, that he went to the Boyne site, that he went to see the Taoiseach, that he did do the stuff with Martin McGuinness in such a good-humoured way. I thought that was good for us as a people.

Now he didn’t do all the other stuff which he should have done in terms of moving the process on and implementing the various commitments he made, but I would forgive him that because it needed him to do the deal, arguably nobody else within unionism could have done the deal.

What do you think of the government’s approach to the recession?
I think it’s quite disgraceful now. I don’t want to personalise it around Brian Cowen, he is doing his best in the job that he’s in, but when the Celtic Tiger was booming people like me were arguing that the wealth should have been put into universal health care, into schools, into social housing, but there was no possibility of sharing the wealth in that way. We were dismissed as political and economic illiterates. Then the Celtic Tiger dies and immediately the wealth gets handed over to the bankers without any conditions. It really is shameful. There is no requirement that the banks provide credit for small and medium businesses, there is no requirement that they ease things for mortgage holders. It’s like that golden circle for fat cats is still there. I was listening to Brian Cowen, and thinking the head of the ESB has a salary of over half a million euro, he can take the hit. The government ministers, and I find this quite despicable, they have three or four in some cases five civil servants doing constituency work for them. So if you phone up about a drain or about getting a house for your child or whatever, the civil servant paid for by you will then go and phone up the various agencies and that’s quite disgraceful.

The government appears to be blaming workers and particularly public sector workers saying the problem is they have too high a wage. What they should be doing is number one to try and retain whatever jobs there are, then to regenerate other jobs and then cut public money going into private hospitals and schools and there are a whole range of other private enterprises that get public money– it’s a scam. If you were doing it and you were caught– if you did what Seán Fitzpatrick of Anglo Irish Bank did– you would be in jail, or if you went down into Moore Street and stole something you would be in jail, so it’s a disgrace.

As you might know our big local issue, the burning one, is the incinerator, have you any views on waste management?
We are very against that incinerator, it’s not good for locals here but neither is it good for the rest of Dublin. It depends how resoloute local people are. There is a big issue of how you deal with waste but we think government policy including the Greens is short sighted, to build it out here in Poolbeg is ridiculous and we are very much opposed to it.

Now a really big question. Do you think there will ever be a United Ireland?
Yes. I don’t think it will happen because it’s the right thing or because it’s inevitable but I do think there is now a very peaceful and democratic way of bringing about a united Ireland. I remember Charlie Haughey going up to address some meeting or other in the Europa hotel in Belfast and there being outrage. Unionists in their thousands crammed the streets and protested his presence. Now it’s taken as a complete given that the Taoiseach other ministers or the President will visit.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs was up recently, the President is there regularly, everybody understands that the island is best as a single island economy. Everybody understands you are better having a uniform joined-up approach on health, on energy on infrastructure.

Name any issue of concern to citizens or to the future of the island, on such a small land mass, with such a small population. What you are reduced to is the politics of two different political allegiances, the notional view that most Irish people have of a broad, depending on how conscious you are, loyalty to Ireland or to the sense of the island or the people who live here and then others who want to maintain the union with Britain. As we continue to build on all the cross-border elements then we can have a national conversation of what kind of Ireland we want.

I’ve been arguing this fairly strenously. Not just in the letter columns of ‘The Irish Times’ although that’s good, or in the TV studios but to actually bring it out to people and it isn’t just unionists although they are crucial to this. But what are the core values that we want to underpin society here? Bring it out to the schools, to the sporting organisations, to the community sector, just an unprecedented debate about how we want to live over the next twenty or thirty years. Out of that clearly we will be able to shape an island society which is basically united, I am quite confident of that.

Where do you see SF going as a political party during that time?
We have a big challenge here in the South. Most of our electoral support is in the ten northerly counties. Then there are huge tracts of support in Dublin and Kerry. We have to build organisation and that is what we are about. For the last three years, as we’ve been able to take our eye off the northern issue, we have been trying to build and develop an organisation which is fit for purpose and trying, I suppose, to interpret republicanism in a way that is relevent to their daily lives. Whether it’s on the economic issue or whether it’s on other matters which are pressing down upon people, it’s a matter of being relevent.

I think the main strength of republicanism is that it’s about rights, it’s about a rights-based society, it’s about citizens, it’s about being stubborn. It’s the 90th anniversary of the first Dáil– the government nearly forgot about it– we have still got a sense of volunteerism and public service at community level and I think the voluntary and community sector are actually the cement which holds a lot of communities together. An awful lot of the people would fall through the cracks if there weren’t those people out there doing all that brilliant work.
In terms of the political dispensation there is no visibility, there is no echo of those great principles of republicanism which are about citizens being entitled as of birthright to a decent life. It’s not there.

Would you like to be president of Ireland?
No, it comes up now and again but I have no ambition that way whatsoever.

Will you ever take up your seat as an MP?
We engage in this strategy of active abstentionsim where you don’t take your seat but you use whatever there is to try to politically improve the situation for constituents.

There was an age-old British law which allowed you to avail of the facilities even if you didn’t take your seat and this was to facilitate these old English republicans and other people who didn’t sign the oath.

Then when we got in they changed the law so we had to fight them on it. If you can imagine the Shinners are in the left tower of the entrance to St James’s Gate in Westminister and occasionally when I am there I go out on the roof just to frighten the security people.

We do get facilities for a researcher and we get mail. You have to take the oath to the Queen to get the salary. Anyway, we have a rule within the party whatever salary we draw down, all of us only take the average industrial wage and the rest of the money goes into the party. So the guy who drives me around has the same salary as me, Martin McGuinness has the same salary as his driver and that allows the party to employ other people so we are very egalitarian that way.

Thank you, Mr Adams.

Thank you, Madam Editor.

Clockwise from top left: Gerry Adams with Daithí Doolan and Ann Ingle in the ‘NewsFour’ office; with Mary Lou McDonald at a meeting; a book of short stories written by Gerry Adams; getting into the sporting spirit at Clanna Gael Fontenoy.

Photographs courtesy of J.P. Anderson.