BY KAREN RAY
PORTLAND, Maine - Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, began his U.S. speaking tour by addressing a crowd of 300 here. The Friends of Sinn Fein in Portland sponsored the meeting.

More than 50 supporters of the Irish freedom struggle welcomed Adams May 9 at the Portland airport. Workers, students, and other backers of Irish self-determination, as well as elected officials from the city and from the state legislature attended the meeting that evening. The Portland City Council welcomed Adams with a placard.

Addressing an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd, the Sinn Fein leader explained that he would accept an invitation to speak anywhere in the world about the peace process and the ongoing struggle for a democratic Ireland. "Twenty years of stopping me from coming here was about meeting people like you," Adams told the crowd. "It was like building a paper wall around Ireland to keep you from knowing the truth.

"We have a host of reasons to not talk to the British and the loyalists. But we have more reasons to talk about peace. We do not need the British to rule. We have the intelligence and the right to govern ourselves," he said.

Adams said the freedom struggle is fighting to build a democratic society, saying, "We need a non-sexist Ireland. We need women and men to see the rule of Ireland be based on equality." He told the audience, "This conflict is not about religious differences but about political differences. We want to see an Ireland where it doesn't matter if you are Protestant or Catholic."

Megan Putnam, a Bowdoin College student, said she had to come and hear Adams in person. She spent a semester in Northern Ireland last year and was deeply affected by what she had seen. Putnam said she is encouraged by the peace talks. "Every talk is a step forward," she said. "There is still a long way to go but this is progress."

Moriah Coughlin, another Bowdoin College student who has traveled to Northern Ireland, said, "When you see the news it seems people don't believe Sinn Fein is being honest. But I think they are honest and these are real moves for real peace taking place."
 

BY NAOMI CRAINE
UNITED NATIONS - "The membership of the United Nations has increased over the years as colonial peoples won their freedom. Many of them learned from the Irish struggle, yet Ireland is still not free," Gerry Adams told reporters at a packed meeting hosted by the United Nations Correspondents Association May 10. The Sinn Fein president answered questions for more than an hour from journalists representing media around the world.

Asked whether the republican party would support sending UN troops as "peacekeepers" in Northern Ireland, Adams said, "We don't want any more foreign soldiers in our country." The decolonization of Ireland is a political question in the world, however, he said. "The British government has argued that these are internal matters for the British government to deal with. We say no, they are international questions."

Commenting on former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's statements comparing Sinn Fein to the bombers of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Adams said, "I don't think given Thatcher's record she's really in a position to lecture anyone. I'm not concerned with her abusing us - she's not prime minister any more. Bobby Sands died 14 years ago. Margaret Thatcher is now a teacher of history. And the republican struggle hasn't gone away."
 

BY FRANCISCO PICADO
NEW YORK - Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams spoke at a $1,000-a-plate-dinner May 10 at the Plaza Hotel here in a packed conference hall. He announced that earlier that day, Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness had led a delegation that met with a British government minister for the first time in decades, as part of the process of negotiating a peace settlement in Ireland.

"We are not afraid to face the British government," he emphasized. "We have never been afraid to face their soldiers, and we are certainly not afraid to make peace with their politicians."

Adams recounted the famine in the 1840s that lead to the death of a million Irish as a result of British oppression, as well as other atrocities committed against the Irish people. "We have plenty of reasons to be bitter, to be spiteful, to be annoyed. And this is why I say that we come to this [process] with a spirit of generosity," he said. "And we call upon the British government to match our generosity.

"We say without any sense of prejudice that Ireland belongs to all the people who live in it," he stated to loud applause. Because, "if it happened in South Africa, why could it not happen in Ireland.

"There will be difficulties, and there will be set backs," the Sinn Fein leader said, "but I can tell you that the tide of history, of 800 years of history, is behind the struggle for freedom, and justice, and peace in Ireland. There is nowhere for the British government to go except back home to their own country."

In closing his speech, Adams paid tribute to Bobby Sands and James Connolly, who he said stood for the emancipation of oppressed peoples worldwide, as well as the "emancipation of rural and urban working people to shape our economic and political destiny."
 

BY CATHLEEN GUTEKANST
SAN FRANCISCO - More than 400 supporters of Irish self- determination turned out May 11 to hear Gerry Adams at a $125-per-person dinner here.

In his speech to the San Francisco meeting, Adams again stressed the importance of international support and solidarity for the Irish freedom struggle. "You people here can have an impact," Adams told the crowd. "The way that campaigns were fought here like the H-Block Four send a definite message. This will make the difference in how long it will take us to get a lasting peace."

Jimmy Smyth, one of the H-Block Four, was introduced from the podium and received an ovation. He is one of four Irish activists who are currently fighting extradition to Northern Ireland. They had escaped from Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland and lived in the San Francisco area for many years before being targeted by the U.S. Justice Department. Smyth won his case for asylum in the United States last September, but the Justice Department is appealing the ruling. The other three men - Terrence Kirby, Kevin Barry Artt, and Pol Brennan - are currently awaiting trial.

Commenting on Sinn Fein's goals, Adams said, "We need to move more speedily toward all-party talks. I'll be attending the economic summit conference [the White House Conference for Trade and Investment in Ireland] hosted by President Clinton in Washington, D.C., in late May. All of the major players in Northern Ireland - the Unionists, the Loyalists, the Social-Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Fein, the Irish government representatives and the British government - will be attending. We hope that the economic conference will also provide a venue for meetings between all of these parties."

Richard McAuley, the Sinn Fein press aide to Adams, noted that Adams had just returned from Switzerland where he was awarded the annual Thorr Peace Prize.
 

BY JON HILLSON
AND TOM O'BRIEN
ST. PAUL, Minnesota - Despite their "racism and their arrogance," the rulers of Britain can see "the handwriting on the wall," said Mary Nelis, a veteran Irish freedom fighter and Sinn Fein member of the Derry City Council, "and the British are going to go."

Nelis spoke to students at the University of St. Thomas here May 11, and at Arise! bookstore in Minneapolis May 12. Minnesotans for a United Ireland sponsored the events. She also participated in several informal meetings and receptions in the area. Nelis is one of several Sinn Fein members touring the United States, backing up the current cross-country visit of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. Washington denied her entry on a previous attempt to visit the United States.

British imperialism's seven decades of partition in Ireland is coming to an end, Nelis said, because "it is a bankrupt policy. The six-county 'state' [of Northern Ireland] has failed, and the 26-county banana republic of Ireland has failed."

Nelis is currently awaiting trial, she said, by the British-run courts on charges she and two other Sinn Fein members kidnapped and beat a young woman. This frame-up, Nelis said, along with the continued imprisonment of more than 800 Irish freedom fighters in the jails of the north, indicates "there is more struggle ahead."

"The current negotiations are an aspect of that struggle," she said, and are a product "of the pressure the Irish people have put on the British government. They could not crush the Irish Republican Army, nor the Irish people who fight for sovereignty, freedom, and equality."

The withdrawal of British troops and the unification of the country, Nelis said, means "a new Ireland."

Nelis joined another touring fighter, from the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, at one reception with local political activists. At another gathering, Nelis responded to the question of a Central American immigrant about Sinn Fein's support for "other struggles against oppression, in Latin America, Africa, and Cuba's permanent fight."

She said Sinn Fein has received delegations from the African National Congress from South Africa, and has supported anti-imperialist struggles in Nicaragua and El Salvador. "We've got no blueprint," she noted. "We need to learn about what a new Ireland can be."

"Why not invite Fidel Castro to visit a free Derry?" she asked.  
 
 
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