Irish Identity

Description: Growing up in West Belfast.

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: My name is Gerry Adams.    I was born in Belfast last Friday 59 years ago. I was born into a very poor working class community in the Falls Road in West Belfast.  We didn’t know we were poor because everybody else was poor as well.  I was the eldest of what became a family of 10 children.  My mother actually was pregnant with 13 children and three died at birth of shortly afterwards.  And I was part of a wider family.  Both my mother and father came from large families as well.  And I can’t remember this of course, but we lived with my grammy.  Later on when I became older I went back to live with my grammy, which was quite a common occurrence.  And she was hugely influential on . . . on me.  And we lived, as many families did, with other members of the family.  And then for a short period in a tenement block in a place called Greencastle, which is on the shore of Belfast lock.  And then somewhere when I was five, or six, or seven, my mother succeeded in getting a house – a ________ house, public housing on the slopes of the Black Mountain – a place called _________.  And the whole family . . . the whole family lived there.  And in fact five or six of my brothers and sisters still live there. My mother, my grammy Adams, my father of course.  My uncle Paddy who I got to know who did a bit of writing, who was hugely tolerant, self-educated, was a ________ but read voraciously and was very knowledgeable.  And my family by the way – and I didn’t know this, and I’m still getting the extent of this as I get older myself – my family mostly on my mother’s side, my mother’s name was Holloway; and my father’s side were political families.  My paternal grandfather died quite early, but I never knew him.  But he had been a member of the _________ movement.  My father and a number of my uncles were imprisoned in the ‘30s into the ‘40s – as _______ prisoners.  On my mother’s side, her father was a Trade Union official.  He had been married twice.  His first wife was also a Trade Union official. In a local newspaper, they have a little column which looks at the past.  I think it’s called “Window into the Past” or “Remembering the Past”.  And one day I saw a little . . . the piece which was produced from the newspaper in 1921 or thereabouts.  And this book about a . . . a . . . this funeral for this woman who had been a Trade Union official and was my grandfather’s first wife.  And I remember my aunt, her daughter, who was _________, saying, “Why didn’t anyone tell me about my mommy?” I just thought it was really evocative of how ________ of history, and how her . . . this woman . . . the small piece _________ funeral and her . . . her ________ championed, particularly women’s causes within, you know . . .  Women weren’t organized within the labor movement at that time.  So I just thought that was . . . that was evocative and also illustrative of how women are ________ history.  But my . . . my . . . my . . . her husband who __________ her sister, actually, was a supporter of ________ and works with James Connelly who were both leaders of the Irish struggle.  James Connelly was a _______ leader that was executed by the British in 1916.  So as I say I only . . .  _________ still pick up bits and pieces of family history.  I wasn’t reared in a very political atmosphere.  At that time, I suppose, in the ‘50s . . . northern . . . I suppose people who would be Republicans or nationalists kept their heads down.  There was a lot of poverty as I said, immigration, bad housing, discrimination.  It was very much ________ sectarian place.  So I was ______ Irish ambience.  It was a little bit of Irish spoken around the house.  And my . . . my grammy was also a great reader, and she used to bring me to the public library, the Carnegie Library, on the Falls Road and introduced me to reading.  _______.  I’m the only one . . .  I’m the only member of my family who wears spectacles because I used to read . . . ________ read by the light of the street lamp which was outside . . . outside the door.

Recorded on: 10/8/07