Gerry Adams: The Belfast barman who became the face of Irish republicanism

On Saturday night, Gerry Adams is making a "historic and significant" speech to delegates at Sinn Fein's annual conference in Dublin.

Amid speculation that the party leader may be planning to step down, Sky News looks back at the career of the world's most recognisable Irish Republican.

Gerry Adams' journey began in a Belfast pub with the most British of names above the door.

He was a barman in The Duke of York, where whispered conversations between lawyers and journalists in the 1970s fuelled his fascination with politics.

Having grown up in a staunchly Republican west Belfast family, he became a political activist and was imprisoned without trial under the Special Powers Act.

He has long denied IRA membership but was temporarily released at the terror group's request to attend secret talks with the British government in 1972.

Within days of those talks, which had failed to produce a ceasefire, 11 people died when 21 bombs exploded in one day, Belfast's "Bloody Friday".

Interviewed some 30 years later, after the Provisionals had apologised for the attacks, Gerry Adams strenuously denied having been the IRA commander who sanctioned them.

Acquitted of IRA membership in 1977, he became a household name in 1983 - elected Member of Parliament for West Belfast and Sinn Fein President.

Margaret Thatcher banned his voice from the airwaves but he remained in the news. Often pictured carrying IRA coffins, he himself survived two assassination attempts.

Brought in from the cold by John Hume, then leader of the nationalist SDLP, Gerry Adams led Sinn Fein to the negotiating table at Stormont.

In time, he persuaded the IRA to call a ceasefire, pursue a political settlement in the form of the Good Friday Agreement and decommission weapons.

When the DUP and Sinn Fein became the largest parties, he nominated his life-long friend Martin McGuinness to share power with the Rev Ian Paisley.

Refusing to swear an oath to the Queen - he refers to her as "Mrs Windsor" - he eventually swapped his Westminster seat for one in Dublin.

But the past continued to haunt Gerry Adams and in 2014, he was arrested by detectives investigating the abduction and murder of Jean McConville in 1972.

The body of the widowed mother-of-10, one of the so-called "Disappeared", had finally been located and recovered from an isolated beach in the Irish Republic.

The Sinn Fein leader insisted he was "totally innocent" in relation to Mrs McConville's murder and was released without charge after four days of questioning.

More recently, he has been dealing with Brexit, Sinn Fein's best-ever result at Stormont, the collapse of power-sharing and death of Martin McGuinness.

Earlier this year, Gerry Adams told Sky News he would be prepared to talk about his past if an independent truth commission was set up.

To some, he will always be a "godfather" figure, alleged to have "blood on his hands", but others prefer to talk about his historic handshakes.

President Clinton reached out to him first, then prime minister Tony Blair, but no one had ever imagined he would shake hands with Prince Charles.

Back in the company of a British Duke, the Belfast barman and face of Irish Republicanism had become the longest-serving political leader in these islands.