FACTBOX-Facts about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams

(Reuters) - Northern Ireland's main Protestant and Catholic parties agreed on Monday to start sharing power on May 8 after their leaders put aside decades of hostility to hold a historic first meeting.

Hard-line Protestant cleric Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, sat side-by-side with Gerry Adams, head of mainly Catholic Sinn Fein, to announce the deal.

Here are some facts about Adams:

* Once hunted by the British army as a guerrilla suspect, Adams has been the public face of Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland for more than two decades.

* The eldest of 10 children, Adams was born in October 1948 into a West Belfast family steeped in revolutionary politics. His forebears were in groups that were forerunners to the IRA but he says he had little awareness of sectarian politics until 1964.

* Adams, president of Sinn Fein since 1983, has always denied membership of the IRA though he is widely held to have been on its leadership council until shortly before the group agreed to give up its weapons.

* A member of the British parliament, Adams has always refused to take his seat because he would be required to swear loyalty to Queen Elizabeth.

* Loathed by pro-British unionists but lionized by Irish republicans, Adams saw 1998's Good Friday peace deal as a way out of conflict. In 2005 he appealed to the IRA to use words, not guns, to fulfil its aim of ending British rule in the province and months later the group said it had ordered its guerrillas to dump all arms.