Adams's dawn

DESPITE howls from the Tory right, Gerry Adams is still due at Westminster on Thursday to promote his autobiography Before The Dawn. The book is being launched at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin on the previous evening, and he then embarks on a promotion tour to the Frankfurt Book Fair - where Ireland is, of course, the theme country and to France, the Netherlands and Greece.

Not only could Adams be considered a little young for an autobiography - he is 48 this year - but the book stops at the 1980-81 hunger strikes which means all his childhood, induction into the republican movement, marriage, years on the run and time in Long Kesh are covered but not the political years which saw him elected an MP and become president of Sinn Fein.

In addition, as he says in an interview with Shirley Kelly in Books Ireland, it was never his intention to become a public figure as for him one of the greatest losses has been the loss of anonymity. The story stops before the political years, he says, because they are too immediate for him to assess and analyse and because there is too much material to fit into a single volume.

Nonetheless the book is creating much attention, not least because of the fuss in Britain over the use of the House of Commons for the launch. The Unionists and the Conservatives, naturally, are giving out but so is Labour leader Tony Blair, of whom it is said that Northern Ireland is so far down his agenda that it has fallen off the end.

The promotion is being hosted by Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and Adams has a right to be there as a former MP, albeit abstentionist. The publishers must be hoping that, as on a previous such occasion, Lady Olga Maitland MP will turn up at the press conference and hurl polite abuse (and publicity) at Adams and Co.