“I’ve spent a great deal of my life talking to politicians,” says Lillis. “He impressed me as one of the most serious and intellectually gifted political people that I have met.”The real testament to Adams’s courage and political skill is that he has brought the IRA leadership with him But he is patient He has played a long game. Since then he has had a number of private conversations with Adams. He says that despite Britain’s public statements, Adams has come to the view that although Britain is not about to leave Northern Ireland, its heart is not in staying. And they were never going to listen while the IRA was killing them.This revealing glimpse into the private thoughts of Gerry Adams comes from Michael Lillis, the former head of the Anglo-Irish Section in Dublin’s Department of Foreign Affairs.Lillis was the principal architect of the Treaty. For a man steeped in republican ideology, exorcising the imperial bogey required a considerable act of intellectual honesty.The logic of Adams’s thinking, encouraged by the SDLP leader John Hume, had begun a momentum of its own: if Britain was neutral, then the challenge, as Hume repeatedly told him, was to persuade the one million Protestants of the merits of a united Ireland. A priest confidant, Father Alec Reid, had opened a private channel to the soon-to-be Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey.

The message that Father Reid carried from Adams was that he would be prepared to consider recommending a ceasefire to the IRA Army Council if Dublin agreed to pursue unification.Adams was in the process of accepting that Britain was, in essence, neutral on the question of reunification. In private we now know that Adams took much more notice of the passage in the Treaty that said if a majority wanted the border to go, Britain would facilitate this.Late the following year, Adams began a secret search for credible alternatives to violence. He based that on Article One, which said that the border would remain so long as the majority wanted it. In public he excoriated the Treaty as a sell-out and a sop to Unionists. The IRA newspaper blamed my television programme for demonising him.Thank God they didn’t kill Adams – because just two years later came the critical turning point in his attitude to violence.It is now clear that the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement was the inspiration for Adams’s reappraisal of the Northern Ireland conflict.

Four months after the programme, loyalists made an attempt on his life They shot and wounded him in a car. He was now seen by Dublin and London as a threat to the stability of both parts of Ireland. So he planned for the Long War by restructuring the IRA from large battalions into small, informer-proof cells, and by turning the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, from a small protest group into a properly organised political party, to generate support from nationalists on the ground.By 1983, Adams had helped create a war machine that seemed poised to eclipse constitutional nationalism in the North. They were reaping the benefits of the hunger strike and Adams himself had developed a huge personal following in West Belfast He was elected MP. Then he still talked about armed struggle as “a necessary and morally correct form of resistance in the six counties ….”Adams was emerging as the IRA’s most influential strategist. From his Long Kesh “cage”, he helped rebuild the IRA after its near-defeat in 1976.

He knew the British would not be driven out by military means alone. Either way it is fair to assume that Adams would have been horrified at the outcome. His regret at the loss of civilian lives is a continuing theme throughout his speeches and writings. He has never glorified violence.But it was in jail from 1974-77 that Adams began to exert a lasting influence on the IRA. I remember Gerry saying that he was also concerned about the routes to and from the bombing … have them checked for road blocks etc.”The security forces say the warnings were either muddled or non-existent; the IRA says that security forces reacted too slowly.