If the struggle has been merely for power-sharing and cross-border bodies, conditions that were on offer at least since 1973--when the SDLP, the Ulster Unionists and the British and Irish governments negotiated the Sunningdale Agreement, based on power-sharing and a cross-border Council of Ireland--then the bloodletting and vicious intrigue described by Moloney has been pointless, sordid and unsupportable. This is how the small bands of republican irreconcilables in the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA see things. Why, then--and here we get to the heart of the matter--has Adams settled for just such a deal, and yet retained huge popularity among the republican rank and file, especially in the cockpit (working-class Catholic) communities of Belfast?

Moloney rightly identifies Adams's 1983 election to Westminster from West Belfast as one of the most significant plot points in his narrative. He might with advantage have directly quoted the new MP's exultant first words to cheering crowds on the Falls Road: "Even De Valera couldn't win the Falls." De Valera had been hammered in West Belfast in the seminal election of 1918. It was one of only two seats in all of Ireland where constitutional nationalism defeated Sinn Fein. This fact, of which Adams was obviously acutely aware, might usefully be kept in mind by commentators who lazily identify the Falls, or the Bogside in Derry, as "traditional republican" areas. They are not. What gave Adams's election its sharp significance was that he was the first republican ever elected in the area. What he meant was, even De Valera couldn't win the Falls for the republican movement.

The Catholic working-class anger that gave rise to the emergence of the Provos as a major player in the early 1970s did not represent a new flowering of republican ideas, an old, authentic, long-repressed tradition suddenly gushing forth again through the cracks caused by the seismic impact of the 1960s civil rights movement. It's truer to say, as Moloney does, that the tiny republican movement of the time, embodied in Belfast in a few families, like the Adamses, the Hannaways, the Prices and the MacAirts, provided an organizational framework, a channel for expression and a readiness to fight that matched the sudden mood of the Catholic masses and offered a ready-made ideology to lend their struggle seeming resonance at a time when their communities were under siege by Protestant loyalist mobs, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army.

One of the most revered rural leaders of the IRA in the 1980s observed a few years ago that "those fellows from Belfast were never really republicans. They were only fighting for their streets." Fighting for your street, of course, is not necessarily an ignoble thing to do. In certain circumstances--Belfast 1969--it can be no more than neighborly duty. But the impulse to defend one's locality doesn't automatically harden into a clear set of ideas. What had pitched whole Catholic working-class communities outside the constitutional arena was not mass conversion to an -ism or a particular conception of history but immediate, material considerations. Most who joined or came to support the IRA did so not out of a sacred duty to "free Ireland" or in pursuit of a historic mission to vindicate the Republic but because they wanted the bigot's boot off their necks and the British Army off their backs. If these grievances could be remedied short of the achievement of the Republic, then there was the basis of a settlement within existing constitutional structures.

Moloney's central thesis is that Adams and a small group around him were on to this sooner than anybody has previously suggested and have long been working to a nonrepublican agenda. His most controversial claim is that Adams, behind the back of the Army Council and with IRA volunteers kept in the dark, opened lines of communication with the British as early as 1986 with a view to eventual negotiation of an "internal" settlement. What is certainly true is that Adams and his close confidants embarked on a project to hollow out the ideology that the movement they inherited had been built around. It was no longer to be republican at its core in any sense in which Pearse would have understood the word. Instead, it was to become, or to accept that it already was, a militant nationalist mass movement, reflecting not what some may have believed Belfast Catholics ought to think but what they actually, "naturally," thought. Moloney accurately identifies the difference as that between the United Irishmen of the 1790s, inspired by the American and French revolutions and out to overthrow the existing order, and the Defenders, a peasant militia established to protect Catholic land rights.

Put more positively, it might be said that Adams, contrary to the conventional account of him leading a people half addicted to violence toward peace, has merely contrived a realignment of republican ideology so as to bring it more closely into kilter with the people in whose name it was purporting to act, offering no challenge to their consciousness. The reason the Adams leadership has been able to retain the support of the republican base while ditching core republican ideas is, on this analysis, that the base was never republican in the first place, that they were only fighting for their streets. This is an unwelcome conclusion to those who have held hard to the legacy of Pearse, and who rage against Adams as the latest in a litany of shame stretching back to Michael Collins and partition. But it's the obvious conclusion to emerge from Moloney's magisterial work, though he doesn't himself draw it out as explicitly as this.

The unsentimental pragmatism underlying Adams's approach is to be seen, too, in the fact that when he veered off the path of armed struggle he veered to the right and not to the left. Having ditched the ideas that underpinned armed struggle, discarding any notion of wanting to turn the world, or even the constitutional status quo, upside down, Adams and the group around him set out to recruit the most powerful allies potentially available--the Catholic hierarchy, the Dublin government, corporate Irish-America, the White House. This has meant resiling from positions that might alienate persuadable interests. Thus, although still generally presenting itself as an anti-imperialist party, Sinn Fein has been careful in recent times not to mobilize against the planned oil war on Iraq. The party's campaign for the release of three men recently arrested leaving FARC-held territory in Colombia has been built on a soft-liberal basis, concentrating on the unlikelihood of the three receiving a fair trial, eschewing any defense of association with the left-wing guerrilla organization.

Most telling of all, the interparty fractiousness that led to the collapse in early October of the institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement concealed a remarkable convergence around center-right economics. In their time in office, all the executive parties--Sinn Fein, the SDLP, Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists and David Trimble's Ulster Unionists--committed themselves to maintaining, if not increasing, direct grants to multinationals and to a reduction in corporate and other taxes on business so as to make Northern Ireland more alluring to outside investment. All advocate fiscal rectitude. All have enthusiastically pursued policies of privatization, flogging off public services to fat-cat entrepreneurs. The general aim has been to refashion still-partitioned Northern Ireland as a viable fragment of the global market by insuring that it is competitively attractive in capitalist terms. It hardly justifies 3,500 dead. It's hardly worth Jean McConville.

Small wonder that Bush's point man, Richard Haass, has no ideological complaint against Sinn Fein. He just wishes it would move more speedily toward completion of what he calls its "necessary transition." As a matter of fact, it's almost there. Ed Moloney's book is the best and necessary account of the long trek across dangerous terrain that brought Sinn Fein to this point, and of the role of Gerry Adams, the political genius who, with guile and daring, has led the way.

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