The New Ireland: A Vision For The Future - Tapa blanda

Published on the centenary of the founding of Sinn Fein,this books marks a significant point in the development in the political life in Ireland. Gerry Adams has been a principal architect of the political growth of republicanism during the last thirty years and he is uniquely positioned to offer an authoritative vision for the political future. Adams imagines an Ireland in which the 1916 Proclamation is seen as a historic document in the mould of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and the Freedom Charter. He outlines the challenge of transforming Irish society through a vision of self-determination and sovereignty, inclusiveness and equality. He looks to the protection of tradition and culture, the defence of rural communities and the need to liberate the individual while instilling a feeling of community and protecting the environment. He sees every single person as a change manager and is strongly internationalist in his perspective. He also looks at events in 2005, and the IRA decision to formally end its armed campaign. He points the way for Irish republicanism and the struggle for Irish unity in the twenty-first century.

President of Sinn Fein and TD for Louth, Gerry Adams has been a published writer since 1982. His books have won critical acclaim in many quarters and have been widely translated. His writings range from local history and reminiscence to politics and short stories, and they include the fullest and most authoritative exposition of modern Irish republicanism. Born in West Belfast in 1948 into a family with close ties to both the trade union and republican movements, Gerry Adams is the eldest of ten children. His mother was an articulate and gentle woman, his father a republican activist who had been jailed at the age of sixteen, and he was partly reared by his grandmother, who nurtured in him a love of reading. His childhood, despite its material poverty, he has described in glowing and humorous terms, recollecting golden hours spent playing on the slopes of the mountain behind his home and celebrating the intimate sense of community in the tightly packed streets of working-class West Belfast. But even before leaving school to work as a barman, he had become aware of the inequities and inequalities of life in the north of Ireland. Soon he was engaged in direct action on the issues of housing, unemployment and civil rights. For many years his voice was banned from radio and television by both the British and Irish governments, while commentators and politicians condemned him and all he stood for. But through those years his books made an important contribution to an understanding of the true circumstances of life and politics in the north of Ireland. James F. Clarity of the New York Times described him in the Irish Independent as "A good writer of fiction whose stories are not IRA agitprop but serious art."