Adams restates SF commitment to peace on French visit

From the warmth of the welcome given to Mr Gerry Adams in Paris yesterday, you would have thought he was Wolfe Tone returning. The Sinn Fein president's French hosts repeatedly mentioned the centuries-old tradition of Franco-Irish friendship.

Mr Jack Lang, former culture minister and the president of the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Commission, thanked Mr Adams "for the struggle you have led for your country, and for your humanism".

Mr Lang had sent the invitation after the peace talks resumed in September, and this new recognition by a key committee of the French parliament was what you might call a peace dividend - little matter that the journalists outnumbered the parliamentarians. Never before had Mr Adams been received so officially in Europe, his aides said.

But Mr Adams had other concerns. When he was asked about yesterday's report in The Irish Times that 35 members of the "1st Battalion" of the IRA's "South Armagh Brigade" had resigned in a further challenge to his conduct of the peace talks, Mr Adams said: "I only read of these resignations in your newspaper this morning. I assume I would have heard about them." He had received no indication of any new resignations. "I can assure you that Sinn Fein's commitment is to our peace strategy. We will not be deflected from that."

Conceding that nine members of Sinn Fein had resigned, Mr Adams commented: "I don't know how many members from the IRA, but they said a small number, and the IRA has credibility and cohesion."

Mr Adams accused "elements of the British establishment" of adopting a "minimalist approach" to the peace talks, thus creating "dissension and confusion" and prompting the resignations. The "elements" in question had been in charge of British policy in Northern Ireland for the past 30 years and still wanted to treat political conflict as a problem of terrorism.

"There's a lot of frustration out there", he said. "It's wider than Sinn Fein. We're not a party of sheep. We're not a monolith." However, he added, he had no reason to believe that there would be further resignations.

Despite the claim that, in his words, "the unionists haven't engaged yet", Mr Adams said he was convinced that there would be a peace settlement.

Earlier, Mr Adams had a short meeting with the former French President, Mr Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Mr Giscard is due to arrive in Dublin today to address the Trinity College Historical Society this evening to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Edmund Burke.