(by Ed Moloney, Sunday Tribune)

Way back in 1983 not long after Gerry Adams had wrested the West Belfast Westminster seat from Gerry Fitt and Sinn Féin's vote in Northern Ireland had topped the 100,000 mark, a very senior member of the Sinn Féin president's small but select group of advisers confided his thoughts about the meaning of it all.

The adviser, a member of the IRA's ruling Army Council, was casting envious glances south of the Border at former comrades in the Workers Party who had just made a significant breakthrough in Dail politics.

A year or so before the WP had got three TD's elected to what Sinn Féin in those days called Leinster House and the Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey had been obliged to cut a deal with them to secure a working majority for government. 1982 was the year it became clear it was unlikely there would ever again be single party government in the South. The era of coalition government had dawned, the day of the small party had come.

The Workers Party, the Adams' adviser explained, might be renegade republicans but they were where Sinn Féin ought to be and could be. WP supporters south of the Border were more or less a mirror image of Sinn Féin voters in the North, largely the urban poor and dispossessed.

And there was a suspicion that on the doorsteps the WP were not averse to exploiting the whiff of sulphur that came with the links to their own gunmen despite their public denunciations of the Provos' paramilitarism. The 'Sticks' had stolen Sinn Féin's clothes, the adviser protested.

The three WP TD's had fashioned an unofficial coalition with Haughey and had brought into being a fantasy their Northern rivals in Sinn Féin had nurtured for themselves during the recent trauma of the prison hunger strikes.

In the midst of the 1981 protest two IRA prisoners, Ciaran Doherty and Paddy Agnew had been elected to the Dail and the fact that the seats were won at Fianna Fail's expense deprived Haughey of a second term in government.

Before the election Adams had resisted suggestions to run non-prisoner candidates on a pro-hunger striker ticket. Ever the cautious operator and largely unsure of the ways of Southern politics, Adams was not convinced they could win. The candidates would also be pledged to take their seats in the Dail if successful but Adams was uncertain if he could deliver the republican movement on this breach of the then untouchable doctrine of abstentionism. And so he balked.

From the demeanour of Adams' adviser it was clear that by 1983 the newly elected MP for West Belfast was regretting he hadn't been bolder. Imagine what could have been achieved, the adviser enthused, if the two TD's had been in the Dail at the time of the hunger strikes? Imagine what could have been if Haughey had needed their votes?

From then on it was clear that the small coterie around Adams would be working feverishly to rectify that mistake; that it was only a matter of time and management before Sinn Féin took another leap on their journey into electoral politics and cut the abstentionist albatross from their necks.

And it was clear also that their ultimate goal was to end up like those three WP TD's in 1982, a minority but influential partner in a coalition government with Fianna Fail, holding the balance of power in the Dail. Adams' success in West Belfast showed what could be achieved.

As the peace process developed in the 1990's I had cause to think back on that exchange many times and often in anger at myself. With hindsight it was obvious that the thoughts of that Adams' adviser back in 1983 carried implications whose significance I had missed at the time, largely because they seemed just so unimaginable and unattainable.

They were this: no major party in the South could contemplate even the most unofficial, tentative alliance with Sinn Féin as long as the Provisional IRA was bombing and shooting all over the place. Indeed it was doubtful if, in a normal, non-hunger strike atmosphere, Sinn Fein could even persuade voters in the Republic to vote for them in large enough numbers as long as the IRA was killing people.

The end result of this train of thought, the logic of his words, is obvious now. Sinn Féin's political ambitions could only be realised if the IRA's campaign was brought to an end. The price would be the blunting at the least and possibly the end of revolutionary politics but the prize could be votes beyond number.

Now, as pressures caused by that same ambition have brought the IRA's Army Council to an historic shift on the issue of decommissioning IRA arms and Sinn Féin to the cusp of success in Southern as well as Northern politics, it is tempting to see events between now and that 1983 exchange with Adams' counsellor as a straight line.

If history concludes that this analysis carries coherence it must surely also decide that no-one was more responsible for setting the Provisional movement on that journey - and keeping it on it - than Gerry Adams.

The story of the rise of Gerry Adams and his influence on the development of the Provisional movement is a long and complex one but there can be little doubt that the one factor which more than any other encouraged the emergence of the peace process was Adams' success in steering Sinn Fein into electoral politics in the early 1980's.

Adams' career in the Provos can be divided into two phases which neatly coincide with the time before his arrest in 1973 when he was the IRA's Belfast commander and the time afterwards.

If the first period can be described as being almost entirely about conducting ruthless and bloody warfare against the British the second was about achieving two very different goals: plotting the take-over and consolidating his control of the IRA and Sinn Fein and charting the move by Sinn Fein into politics.

Adams began Sinn Féin's journey into electoral politics by reviving notions that had been around when he joined the Goulding dominated republican movement in 1964. IRA Volunteers, he urged from jail, should identify with ordinary people's social and economic needs and by so doing build popular support for the IRA.

It was but a short step from that type of thinking to actually standing in elections. Initially Adams' advisers thought the most that could be achieved was an intervention at local council level. But the 1981 hunger strike changed all that. Bobby Sand's success in Fermanagh-South Tyrone and the election of Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew catapulted Sinn Fein into the big time.

In 1982 Sinn Féin stunned the Irish political establishment by capturing ten per cent of the vote in elections to a new NI Assembly. The next year Adams was a Westminster MP and SF had broken through the magic 100,000 votes barrier.

The 'Armalite and ballot box' strategy was born. SDLP leader John Hume was one of the first to spot the inherent contradiction in the strategy, that the ballot box could only thrive at the expense of the Armalite and vice-versa. But it would be surprising if Adams himself was not also aware that there wasn’t room in the same organisation for both.

Adams' great genius lies in being able to manoeuvre the republican movement down roads it would never travel if left to itself. So it was with the dropping of abstentionism, the end of the IRA's armed struggle, the acceptance of partition, Unionist consent and reformism, the peace process itself, decommissioning and all the other extraordinary ideological U-turns performed in the last decade.

The scenario would nearly always be the same. Protesting that he himself was unalterably opposed to course 'A', Adams would so engineer circumstances that course 'A' would eventually re-emerge as the only viable option left. Faced with a fait accompli the rank and file would dutifully follow where he had always wanted them to go.

The key to understanding how Adams persuaded the Provisional movement to embrace the peace process lies in understanding the impact of the 'Armalite and ballot box' strategy on the IRA. The strategy set in motion pressures that were to chip away at the IRA's armed struggle - especially after abstentionism was dropped in 1986.

Every time the vote dipped in the North for instance or ambitious electoral targets in the South were missed by miles the IRA's armed struggle would be isolated as the culprit. The list of ‘legitimate’ targets would be gradually trimmed, vetting and central control of IRA operations introduced and, crucially, civilian casualties identified as the single most damaging cause of electoral setbacks.

In the end, given the realities of guerrilla warfare, the only way civilian casualties could be avoided, the only way Sinn Féin could grow electorally was for the IRA to shut up shop. Which is what it has done. And because of that in the end there was no alternative either to the peace process.

One of the few things about the peace process that can be stated with confidence is that we have not yet been given a full and credible account of what happened, how it started and why it happened. The other is that the story will almost certainly show that Gerry Adams played as central and controversial a role in this period of Irish history as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera did in theirs.