When he emerged as a presence on the international scene, Adams had become a hate figure in England. With his unnerving calm and his baritone erudition, he was a deeply polarising and palpably dangerous figure: a righteous, charismatic, eloquent apologist for terrorism. Fearful, perhaps, of his powers of ideological seduction, the Thatcher government imposed a peculiar restriction, ‘banning’ the IRA and Sinn Féin from the airwaves. What this meant in practice was that when Adams appeared on television, British broadcasters were prevented, by law, from transmitting the sound of his voice. His
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