They want a new Ireland, not simply an Ireland in which the six counties in the North are tacked onto the South. A peace conference would almost certainly lead to an all-Ireland constitutional convention, with full representation for every possible point of view, from right-wing fascist to the Maoists and the great majority in between. And from that convention will come the new Ireland, shaped and led by the Irish.

All of this assumes that there is reason and compassion in London, which might be a false assumption. But if Heath and the British government keep on this way, there is no prospect for anything except more killing and more destruction. Until the day when reason prevails, the fighting will go on.

V.

There are no Saint Patrick’s Day parades in the Ireland of Gerry Adams. There are no leprechauns. There is no green beer. There are few toora-loora-loora sentimentalities, no room for sure-and-begor-rah stage-Irishmen. Gerry Adams lives in the real Ireland, and it’s a very dangerous place.

“I suppose there’s a 90 per cent chance I’ll be assassinated,” Adams said in early 1984, “and that upsets me on a human level.”

On March 14, 1984, some of the people who would like to permanently upset Adams on a human level made their move. In broad daylight in the shadow of the Victorian city hall in Belfast, three members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Protestant paramilitary group, came roaring from a side street in a gray Cortina and fired nine shots at a car carrying Adams and three friends. Adams was shot in the neck, right shoulder and upper arm. But this time, to the dismay of his enemies, Adams would live.

At 38, lean, bearded, tweedy, he is the head of Sinn Fein, the legal political party that supports the outlawed Irish Republican Party (IRA) in its fight for a unified Ireland. He is the elected member of the British Parliament from West Belfast, although he refuses to swear an oath of loyalty to the British Grown and formally take the seat. Adams is a republican, with a small “r,” and a socialist. And though he is capable of self-mocking laughter, dark ironies, private humors, Gerry Adams is a very serious man.

Some of that seriousness is evident in the major facts of his life. Consider just one: from 1970 to 1980, Gerry Adams, the son of a day-laborer, spent 4V2. years in British prison camps without ever coming before a jury. During that same decade, he was on the run for 14 months, always moving, wary of informers, hunted by British Army agents and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which is the British-financed police force in the six counties of the North.

It was a heartbreaking decade in modern Irish history, and Adams was an intricate part of its numerous tragedies. He was a close friend of Bobby Sands, who died in a hunger strike, and he knew most of the others who followed Sands to the martyr’s grave. Many of Adams’ other republican friends have been killed, maimed or imprisoned in the grueling war that started in August 1969. Some have given up, left the field of battle, stepped away from the movement, emigrated. Adams struggles on. Dismiss him as a romantic revolutionary, say that the dream of a united Ireland is hopeless, that Irish nationalism is an anachronism, but you must give Gerry Adams this: he has not chosen to live an easy life.

“Adams speaks with the authority of his experience,” a Dublin newspaperman told me. “That’s his advantage over all other politicians in this country, north or south. He has paid a stiff personal price for his beliefs, and that can’t be taken away from him.”

In the years since the 1981 hunger strikes, Adams has led Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone” in Irish) to a prominent place in Irish politics. Sinn Fein has broadened its base, rolled up large votes, and begun to build a Tammany-style service organization, with six advice centers in West Belfast alone. It now seems possible that Adams might supplant John Hume, of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), as principal representative of the Catholic nationalist side of the northern political equation. At the same time, Sinn Fein has become more active in the 26-county Republic to the south, battering heroin peddlers in the slums of Dublin, trying to channel the anger and disillusion of unemployed Irish youth into politics, presenting an alternative to what Adams calls “the tweedledum and tweedledee” of the Republic’s two major political parties.

“I think we’ll do all right in the next elections,” Adams says. “We’ve got a few things going for us.”

There are a number of people who believe that Adams is a mere front man for the IRA, if not its actual leader. Since membership in the IRA would send him to jail, the truth might not be known until the war is over. But to some extent, the question is academic; Adams frankly, warmly, openly supports the IRA.