It's commonly accepted in the UK and Ireland that the President of the Irish political party Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (pIRA or IRA). This is a charge that Gerry Adams has denied.
I want to know what counts as, and what historical evidence there is for either position.
There's a lot of evidence that Gerry Adams was not just in PIRA, but that he was a high up in the organisation.
Several former PIRA members have named Adams as having been a senior figure in PIRA in the 1970s and 80s.
Sean Mac Stiofáin, the first Chief of Staff of PIRA, named Adams as having been part of a PIRA negotiating team that met with then British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw in London in 1972 (Sean Mac Stiofáin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp.278-279)
Brendan Hughes, a hunger striker and former member of PIRA's Army Council (it's ruling body), organised Bloody Friday in 1972 in which 27 bombs exploded in Belfast city centre in around 80 minutes and has named Adams as being the commanding officer of PIRA's Belfast brigade at the time.
Delours Price, convicted of bombing the Old Bailey in London in 1973, in a 2012 interview named Adams as her commanding officer while she was in PIRA, says that he was responsible for 'the Disappeared', and says that he approved a PIRA bombing campaign in Great Britain.
Peter Rogers, who was sentence to life in prison for the murder of a Garda in Wexford in 1980, says that Adams ordered him to transport explosives to Great Britain two days before the murder.
Sean O'Callaghan (who was PIRA's OC Southern Command at the time), listed Adams in court as having been at meeting of PIRA's Revolutionary Council in 1983 and meetings of PIRA's General Headquarters staff in 84 and 85.
As well as this, Adams was a representative of PIRA at a meeting with the British government at the home of the head of the Red Cross in Derry in 1972. Photos also exist of Adams wearing the PIRA's 'uniform' of a black beret at the funeral of a PIRA commander in 1971 (see about 1/3 down the page). While interned at Long Kesh in the early 1970s Adams wrote articles for the republican newspaper An Phoblacht under the pen name 'Brownie' (he claims a number of writers used the same name, but other PIRA members referred to him as Brownie at times) in which he stated "Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer" (more information on the 'Brownie' link can be found in 'Man of War, Man of Peace' by David Sharrock and Mark Devenport, who is currently BBC Northern Ireland's political editor, with excerpts quoted here)