Before the Dawn: An Autobiography

by Gerry Adams

Overview

In this fascinating memoir of his early life, Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin, describes the development of the modern “Troubles’’ in the North of Ireland, his experiences during that period, including secret talks with the British government and imprisonment, his leadership role in Sinn Féin, and the tragic hunger strike by imprisoned IRA prisoners in 1981. Born in 1948, Adams vividly recalls growing up in the working-class Ballymurphy district of West Belfast, where he became involved in the civil rights campaign in the late 1960s and was active in campaigns around issues of housing, unemployment, and civil rights. The unionist regime, which had been in interrupted power for 50 years, reacted violently to the protests, and the situation exploded into conflict. Adams recounts his growing radicalization, his work as a Sinn Féin activist and leader, his relationship with the IRA, and the British use of secret courts to condemn republicans. Adams was a political prisoner. He was arrested many times and recounts his torture. He spent a total of five years in the notorious Long Kesh prison camp. First as an internee, held without charge, and then as a sentenced prisoner after he made two failed attempts to escape. Adams chronicles the dramatic hunger strikes of Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, and others in 1980–81 which saw ten men die. Though he opposed the hunger strike Adams was instrumental in organizing the mass campaign in support of the hunger strikers which saw Bobby Sands elected as a member of the British Parliament and Ciaran Doherty and Kevin Agnew elected to the Irish Parliament. Before the Dawn is an engaging and revealing self-portrait that is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand modern Ireland. First published in 1996—at a time when politics in the North of Ireland was in crisis and the Good Friday Agreement was still two years away—this new edition contains a brand new introduction and epilogue written by the author, covering Adams’s family, Brexit, and the peace process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268103781
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	02/28/2018
Pages:	366
Sales rank:	461,850
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gerry Adams was president of Sinn Féin for more than three decades. He stepped down from that position on February 10, 2018. He remains a Teachta Dála (TD) for Louth East Meath until the next general election. He is the author of 16 books, including An Irish Eye and The New Ireland: A Vision for the Future. His books have won critical acclaim in many quarters and have been widely translated.

Read an Excerpt

The year I entered the world was a time of change internationally and in Ireland, but for the ruling powers in Belfast, it was a time of resistance to change. Belfast was the former centre of a thriving linen industry and home to the shipbuilders who had built the Titanic. The city’s economy had benefited from World War II: Harland & Wolff had been busy building warships, and 250,000 US troops stationed in the north during the war had contributed much additional income. However, large numbers of people had lost their homes in the bombing of Belfast, leaving a continuing housing crisis, with many still housed in temporary dwellings.

The British-controlled statelet created in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland was less than thirty years old, and the family and the community into which I was born opposed the very existence of ‘Northern Ireland’ as a separate entity under the British crown. South of the border Eamon de Valera lost a general election in 1948 after sixteen years as Taoiseach. In India, Gandhi died, just as British rule drew to a close; Britain departed, too, from Palestine as the state of Israel was proclaimed. If the times possessed a particular theme it was undoubtedly the post-war decline of the British Empire, a decline spelt out in India and Palestine, apparent in Africa, and palely reflected in the Republic of Ireland Act, whereby the twenty-six counties of Ireland left the British Commonwealth.

In 1950, when Margaret was still a babe in arms, we moved from Granny Adams’s to a single large room in a gloomy, decaying house at 726 Shore Road in Greencastle, on the side of Belfast Lough. The house belonged to an order of nuns, who had given it over to a housing agent to collect the rent, and our room on the ground floor was partitioned off into areas. Upstairs was a tap for water and a toilet, which were shared with many other families. Here my mother, an articulate and gentle woman, struggled heroically to rear a growing family on next to nothing, and here we stayed for four and a half years, during which time two more children, Paddy and Anne, were born. My father did his best as a building labourer to provide for his young family, but these were difficult times, and although he was a hard worker, work itself was hard to come by, especially as a former political prisoner. Whenever he was sent looking for a job by the employment exchange they informed his prospective employers of his record and status. For a time he and an old prison friend Jimmy Bannon travelled from door to door selling fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. It was the horse, Paddy Joe, who profited most from their partnership, for both my da and Jimmy found it difficult to refuse credit to friends and neighbours, and after some time the business folded.

My mother was never overly robust, yet in her struggle to rear us and care for us she was the pillar of the family, and she plotted escape from our miserable slum room into a real house. In addition to the conditions in which we were living, the social isolation of being in Greencastle was a constant problem, given the cost of bus fares to get to Leeson Street and Abercorn Street where there were family and friends. My Uncle Seán and his girlfriend Rita used to come by bicycle to visit, but because it was so far off the beaten track they and my Granny Adams were the only regular visitors.

There was an enormous demand for housing in Belfast: overcrowding was high in the city as a whole, but nearly twice as high in the Falls, the main centre of Catholic population. Of all the houses in the city, almost three-quarters required some form of repair; at least 200,000 new dwellings were estimated to be needed to meet even basic needs. Now Ballymurphy estate, planned in 1948 to meet part of the housing emergency, had started to be built, and my mother was trying her best to get us a house there.

I recall almost nothing of my life in Greencastle beyond a sense of the dark and gloomy house, and I remember nothing at all about my first school, Star of the Sea. But one of my earliest memories is of going with my mother to the house of Seamus McKearney, a local representative on Belfast Corporation whom she was lobbying in pursuit of a house. He lived close to Inkerman Street, home of the Hannaway family, and I accompanied my mother on a number of occasions when she went from Granny Hannaway’s to Mr McKearney’s. Even though I was very young, I recall the day when we eventually got word that there was a possibility of our being housed. I was standing on the pavement outside McKearney’s front door, while he and my mother were engrossed in conversation, he in the hall, she at the doorway.

Some time later she and my Granny Adams, my sister Margaret and I went up the Springfield Road on a journey which took us as far as the bus could go, right up on to the slopes of the Black and Divis Mountains. There we came to a huge building site in an area of green fields. We ploughed our way through the muck past heavy construction vehicles, cement mixers and lorries trundling back and forth.

My mother had a letter in her hand which she showed to one of the workmen.

‘That’s Divismore Park,’ he told her, and I could see that she was delighted, even though what he was pointing to was only a row of foundations.

My granny and my mammy counted down along the row until we got to number 11, which was little more than a big pile of sand; but we could see where pipes were going in, and the base had been laid.

‘That’s our house,’ my ma told us, her voice full of wonder. ‘That’s where we are going to live.’

(excerpted from chapter 1)

Table of Contents

Foreword

1. One

2. Two

3. Three

4. Four

5. Five

6. Six

7. Seven

8. Eight

9. Nine

10. Ten

11. Eleven

Epilogue

Index

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Impressively informative, exceptionally candid, extraordinarily detailed, and an inherently fascinating read from cover to cover, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography will prove to be an immediate and enduringly popular addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections in general, and Irish Political History supplemental studies reading lists in particular.” —Midwest Book Review Bookwatch

"A definitive history of the Irish struggles of the 1970s, from the nationalist point of view. Adams, a fine writer, presents a straightforward, unapologetic memoir." —Publishers Weekly

Before the Dawn can be read as the history of the last quarter-century in Northern Ireland, from the perspective of someone who educated himself and came to power within one of the traditions—a crucial one at the moment—of the province. . . . Adams has written this autobiography to define his own position, rather than that of others. He writes not as a historian but as an embattled participant, choosing his words with wariness."—The Washington Post

"Gerry Adams is a gifted writer who, if he were not at the center of the war-and-peace business, could easily make a living as an author, of fiction or fact." —The New York Times

From the Publisher

Impressively informative, exceptionally candid, extraordinarily detailed, and an inherently fascinating read from cover to cover, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography will prove to be an immediate and enduringly popular addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections in general, and Irish Political History supplemental studies reading lists in particular.

Midwest Book Review Bookwatch

Adams was born in Belfast in 1948 into a devoutly Republican family. He fondly remembers growing up poor in a loving household that included nine brothers and sisters (three siblings died in infancy). He recalls being told the "facts of life" by his father: "...keep [your] wee man clean and stay away from bad women." He also reminisces about how crucial the pawnshop was to the family's survival and gives a hilarious rendition of his first Communion. After completing secondary school during the mid-'60s, Adams worked in a pub and was politicized by the Catholic civil rights marches in Belfast. He blames much of the problems in the north on the former Six Counties Stormont government, which he says had "a supremacist credo similar to South Africa's apartheid system." He points out that "pogroms" and gerrymandering have had a devastating effect on the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. He discusses the beginning of the Stormont government policy of internment without trial in 1971 and his own imprisonment on three occasions for IRA activity. He has high praise for President Clinton's pressure on the British government in the peace talks, while he blasts former Irish minister Conor Cruise O'Brien for his "McCarthyite" tactics. Except for a mention in a brief epilogue, readers looking for revelations about the peace process in Northern Ireland will be disappointed, because the book ends after the IRA hunger strikes in 1981. It is arguably, however, a definitive history of the Irish struggles of the 1970s, from the nationalist point of view. Adams, a fine writer, presents a straightforward, unapologetic memoir. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The controversial Sinn Fein leader comes clean in this autobiography.

Library Journal

In this compelling memoir of his early life, the president of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, recalls the development of the modern "Troubles" in Northern Ireland and his own central role in them, culminating in the tragic hunger strike by incarcerated IRA members in 1981.

Born in 1948, Adams vividly recalls the Belfast of his early life as a coldly sectarian place. It was polarized between the loyalist majority, many of whose members belonged to anti-Catholic organizations like the Orange Order, and impoverished Catholics, who were unable to speak freely, were not allowed the right to display nationalist symbols, and were often denied equal opportunity in housing and employment. Adams traces his growing political consciousness to routine events in Northern Ireland: The annual parades of unionists on July 12, the banning of republican activities, and the activities of violent unionist paramilitary organizations like the B Specials. Dissatisfaction over a lack of democracy found expression in protests over grim state-sponsored housing units and the banning of nationalist parades. The unionist forces reacted violently, and the situation exploded into civil war. Adams describes his growing radicalization, his leadership role in the political wing of the IRA, and the British use of secret courts to convict republicans. Adams was himself a political prisoner, one of the first in the infamous Long Kesh, and underwent torture at the hands of the British authorities, which he describes graphically. Adams concludes his account by recording the dramatic hunger strikes of Bobby Sands and others in 198081, which he initially resisted but which he now recognizes as having revitalized the nationalist movement. Adams was elected a British MP in 1983, part of a pattern of Sinn Féin electoral success that resulted in the recent Anglo-Irish agreement.

An eloquent and persuasive presentation of recent Irish history.

Kirkus Reviews

"Gerry Adams is a gifted writer who, if he were not at the center of the war-and-peace business, could easily make a living as an author, of fiction or fact."

The New York Times

"Before the Dawn can be read as the history of the last quarter-century in Northern Ireland, from the perspective of someone who educated himself and came to power within one of the traditions—a crucial one at the moment—of the province. . . . Adams has written this autobiography to define his own position, rather than that of others. He writes not as a historian but as an embattled participant, choosing his words with wariness."

The Washington Post