Like the organisation Adams heads, his standing has diminished as peace segues into normal, boring politics, writes Fionnula O Connor.
IT COMES at a curious moment for the new Northern dispensation. The Taoiseach's departure means many things, among them that by the second week in May - barring another sudden farewell to public life - the only party leader still in office who concluded the 1998 agreement will be Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin president, MP and MLA for West Belfast.
It only takes a few chips off the marble for the shiniest figurehead to start looking shabby. No more than middling evidence exists as yet of decline in the Adams status within his party, but the glory days are past. In communal currency Blair is already a memory, Hume and Trimble mere holograms, Paisley and now Ahern are on the way out. Among bad-minded and faithful alike, the whisper begins: can Gerry be far behind?
As he watched Bertie make the leap towards private citizenship yesterday, the impassive Adams perhaps showed a tremor - though probably more of premonition than empathy.
It is probably true to say that Adams and Ahern cordially dislike each other, personally and politically. The demise of the old identification between Northern and Southern nationalism that John Hume so nourished and Sinn Féin so misjudged became flesh, and snappish flesh at that, when Bertie clocked Sinn Féin as an electoral rival and lost patience with the republican leadership in negotiations - whichever of those developments came first.
Adams may allow himself the wry observation that even at a sleaze high water mark, the garlands heaped on Ahern for the Belfast Agreement are a more secure valediction of the Taoiseach's career than the Sinn Féin leader himself seems likely to earn.
There is no real sign that Adams is under internal pressure. But like the organisation he heads, his standing has diminished as peace segues into normal, boring politics.
The Dáil election was a slap in the face for both party and president. An even more painful Adams realisation must be that he looks a little shrunken where he once stood tallest and most commanding: in west Belfast, his own home base and modern republicanism's capital.
Sinn Féin in Stormont has failed to shine and Martin McGuinness powersharing with Ian Paisley has its drawbacks, not least relegation for Adams. It is a long time since he last looked presidential, and now he has lost face at home. In its own defence, "the West" long ago became self-aggrandising. It is struggling to adjust to the most predictable of outcomes - that an end to war would not deliver prosperity and crime-free streets, no more than in Harriet Harman's Peckham or Ahern's Dublin.
Signing up to support civil policing produced no miracles beyond the spectacle of senior officers sitting down in public meetings with local people. Not at all surprisingly, the PSNI has not defeated "the hoods" any more than IRA beatings, shootings, exiling and the occasional "execution" did.
Some locals always jibbed at Sinn Féin dominance, though not necessarily because they loathed the IRA. It was the new establishment many disliked: agencies fronted by Adams's supporters, cheerleaders at cultural events not exactly rattling jewellery in the best seats but setting a communal tone, with a backbeat of IRA enforcement.
Most acknowledged the uplift for a formerly downtrodden community, but resented the imposition nonetheless.
The violent deaths of two local men who apparently confronted young hoodlums have pointed up painful reality - perhaps most for ageing republicans aware of their own mortality.
Without the IRA at their backs, some have arrived on the doorsteps of "problem families" to be told where to go, or, worse, asked who they think they are.
It may be that leadership status has to be won afresh in west Belfast. Ranting against inadequate policing lets off steam, but is a diversion, like attacking critics - as Adams may have found out already. "Do nothing of any knee-jerk," he once idiosyncratically appealed to republicans, at a tense moment for negotiations. But knee-jerk he did when lambasted a fortnight ago by the Squinter column in the Andersonstown News. Squinter is editor Robin Livingstone: the Andytown News has been Pravda to the Sinn Féin Kremlin. Blaming Adams - because he has been an MP for 20 years - for shirking responsibility for local ills might have been a mite skewed, but Squinter the rebel was a revelation.
The rebellion was brief. The next edition carried a stiff Adams objection on the front page and a slavish apology. Squinter's defiance and the raft of substantially supportive responses - one comparing Sinn Féin unfavourably with Ian Paisley jnr's lobbying at St Andrews for his "own people" - were wiped from the paper's website.
Obviously nobody dared tell the Dear Leader what a comedown this was from windy talk about democracy and equality.
He may grudge the limelight to Deputy First Minister Martin. But if you want to stay number one in a collective leadership, self-awareness should surely be a help.