Gerard Adams, who has died aged 77 after a long illness, was important in the emergence of the Provisional IRA in 1970, and was a seminal political influence on his son, the Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, who has pulled out of campaigning for the Northern Ireland Assembly elections for family mourning.
In latter years, the older man often appeared on republican platforms with his son.
Born in Belfast, Adams - widely known as "old Gerry" - was an active republican, whose grandfather had been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
In 1942, aged 16, he was shot and captured while escaping after an attack on the police in Belfast; he had wounded two officers with a Webley pistol, which then jammed. Jailed for eight years - five of which he served - he was released at 21 and married Annie Hannaway, the daughter of a similarly republican family. Gerry, born the following year, was their first child.
Because of his conviction, Adams, a labourer, found it difficult to get work, and, with a fellow ex-prisoner, Jimmy Bannon, he tried unsuccessfully to make a living selling fruit and vegetables from a horse and cart. When he could get work, he worked extremely hard: in his autobiography, Before The Dawn, Gerry recalls his father saying, "If you have six or seven children to feed, you'll step into the muck, son".
Adams was not active in the IRA campaign of the 1950s, but he did maintain political contacts, particularly with republican prisoners. Out of these connections came the Irish Republican Felons Association, of which he was the first chairman.
In the late 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to rioting, he became involved in negotiations to protect his home area; while his son was organising barricades in west Belfast, he was elected chairman of the Ballymurphy estate committee.
These community defence committees spawned the reborn IRA, and when the republican movement split, Adams supported the Provisionals against the Officials. In Ballymurphy, the older men - Adams among them - used barbed wire to trap British soldiers, whom the younger activists lured into the estate.
In June 1970, as the violence worsened, Adams was arrested and beaten by British troops. His son described arriving as his father was put into an ambulance: "His face was a mask of blood, and hospital examination revealed a hairline fracture of the skull. He was subsequently beaten quite badly on a few more occasions, and once the paratroopers hammered him very badly. In his own day, he had been a robust, stocky little fighter, and they gave him a very hard time."
Adams was interned in 1971, along with his son, brothers, cousins and uncles. As his son rose in Sinn Féin, and through the peace process, he was less active, but always supportive.
His wife predeceased him, and three of their sons died in infancy. Five sons and five daughters survive him.
Gerard Adams: political activist, born 1926; died November 17th, 2003