Adams offers to meet dissidents on policy shifts
Gerry Adams today offered to meet dissident republican chiefs in a bid to win their backing for Sinn Féin’s historic plans to endorse the PSNI.
The West Belfast MP also urged the Real IRA, Continuity IRA and Irish National Liberation Army to end all armed violence, insisting a united Ireland can be achieved peacefully.
With Sinn Féin facing internal tensions and potential splits over its decision to hold a special ard fheis (party conference) to consider the once unthinkable, embracing the police force, its party president claimed he had no problem with former comrades running against his representatives in elections to the Stormont Assembly.
Should republicans vote to end generations of opposition at the defining January 28 gathering in Dublin, it would remove one of the final blocks to restoring a devolved government in Belfast.
The pressure would then be on Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists to pledge to share power in a coalition administration with Sinn Féin.
Amid consultations and public debates involving the republican party faithful over the scale of the imminent undertaking, Mr Adams has now attempted to ease dissent from outside by making his appeal to splinter organisations that refused to recognise the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and continue with sporadic bouts of terrorism including the Omagh bombing, which claimed 29 lives.
In a message to the dissidents who have issued death threats against him and senior party representatives Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, he said: “I want to meet with these organisations to brief them in detail on current developments and impress upon them my belief that the current Sinn Féin strategy is the best way forward for our community and for the wider republican struggle.
“I am willing to work with the families of prisoners belonging to or supportive of these groups and I have already raised with both governments a number of issues, including the conditions in Maghaberry Prison and the transfer of prisoners held in England back to Ireland.”
Mr Adams told the dissident republicans still committed to violence that they had no strategy for delivering Irish unity.
“They have no popular support. Their actions are counter-productive,” he said.
“Their actions put the lives of innocent people and their own members in grave danger.
“The only product of their campaign is incidents like the tragedy of Omagh, where republican and unionist lives were taken, and the destroyed lives of an increasing number of young people facing long prison sentences.
“I appeal to those groups engaged in armed actions to end them. I do not want to see any other people killed or imprisoned as a result of their activities.”
He also welcomed the decision of republicans who oppose Sinn Féin to stand in the Assembly polls planned for March.
Mr Adams said: “Elections are the proper arena for testing different political views and analysis and I look forward to defending and promoting and winning popular re-endorsement of the Sinn Féin peace strategy.
“The Sinn Féin leadership is willing to meet with and discuss all of these matters with other republican groups, including how we can secure the release of political prisoners.
“Sinn Féin is intent on journeying on from here, to be part of building a republic worthy of those who made the supreme sacrifice.”
He added: “The goal of a united Ireland remains absolute, but the means by which it can be achieved no longer needs to involve armed actions.
“The conditions which in the past led to republican armed actions have fundamentally changed.
“Armed struggle was never a republican principle. It was an option of last resort in the absence of any other alternative.
“But there is now an alternative. There is a peaceful way to achieve political change, equality, justice and ultimately Irish freedom.
“Given our collective history, the current debate on policing is undoubtedly a difficult one for all Irish republicans. We have all suffered as a result of political policing, some more directly and painfully than others.
“We cannot and should not forget the abuses of the past. We need to expose these abuses and those responsible for them, but we also have a responsibility to create a different and better future.
“We need to hold both police services to account. They need to uphold the rights of citizens in a non-partisan and professional way. That is the core of Sinn Féin’s approach to policing."
