Adams asks IRA to embrace politics
(CNN) -- Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has appealed to the Irish Republican Army to make a "historic" decision to use "purely political and democratic activity" to achieve its goals.
In a short speech addressed to the IRA leadership and to what he called the men and women who are the "volunteer soldiers" of the IRA, Adams said there is now an alternative to armed struggle.
Adams said that while he had previously defended the IRA's right to use arms there is a now an alternative -- "to build political support for republican and democratic objectives across Ireland and win support for those goals internationally.
"I want to use this occasion therefore to appeal to the leadership (of the IRA) to fully embrace and accept this alternative," he said.
Adams did not -- as he had been urged to do by the Irish and British governments -- directly call for the IRA to disband, but he called on the men and women who are members to the IRA to become "activists in a nationalist movement."
Sinn Fein has been reeling after a series of developments including the refusal of the IRA to decommission its arms by providing photographic proof and accusations that the IRA was involved in a multimillion-dollar bank robbery.
And this year IRA members killed a man in a pub fight, prompting its leadership to tell the sisters of the victim, Robert McCartney, that it would kill those IRA members if they wanted.
Adams defended the IRA, saying it had upheld every commitment it had made, but the IRA's political enemies and the "shortsighted" attitudes of the British and Irish governments had set back attempts to reach a peace in Northern Ireland.
He said the republican movement had been "vilified" and was being used as an excuse not to negotiate a peace.
He singled out criticism by the Irish government, which he said was motivated by the growing influence of Sinn Fein.
