MARTIN SHEEN and Anjelica Huston were on the guest-list for cocktails with Gerry Adams at the World Trade Centre last week in New York. They were said to have paid Sinn Fein $1000 each for the privilege of seeing its leader in close-up. This is roughly 100 times the price of a drink in the roof-top bar, but a snip when you consider the social cachet Mr Adams apparently confers on the humble celebrity. He has pressed the flesh of so many stars that when Hollywood comes to make the Adams biopic, as it surely will, the lead actor will be plagued with advice from his peers on exactly how to finger the beard and walk the Adams walk.

Was anyone tactless enough to remark on the splendid job the builders had made of repairing the skyscraper in which they stood? Apparently, you can hardly see a trace of the damage caused by terrorist bombs a few years ago. But no self-respecting screen star would mention Semtex in front of Gerry Adams. Hollywood's devotion to Ireland is so sentimental that it sees only one face of the Troubles and that face has the rugged features of Liam Neeson. Now that the peoples of Ireland have voted, the romantic revolutionary with his smiling Irish eyes will have to be sent back to central casting. Tinseltown is faced with a choice of its own, whether to make turgid political dramas about a power-sharing political executive elected on the basis of proportional representation and dedicated to the establishment of successful cross-border institutions, or go for something with the smallest box-office

potential. In this tricky decision, they may be advised by the recent success of the Irish director John Boorman.

When Boorman's film about the Dublin criminal Martin Cahill was shown at Cannes a couple of weeks ago, there wasn't a dry eye in the house even though the screening was at nine in the morning. The audience cheered at the antics of the roguish Cahill, one journalist told me, whenever he foiled the blundering Gardai. They wept as Cahill was shot in Butch Cassidy slow-mo. Above all, they gave Boorman this year's Best Director Award for The General. Boorman has handed Hollywood a prototype for the post-referendum Irish movie. His film, shot in genteel grey and white like some Ealing comedy, is full of humour. Cahill exchanges stolen loot for a cheque at a bank and then has his

gang rob back the cash. When the Gardai are lying in wait outside his house, he confuses them by sending the gang members out one after the other, disguised to look exactly like him. He does not drink, smoke, or pay taxes.

An ideal Robin Hood of a hero - except that in reality Cahill was a violent thug who kneecapped and even crucified his victims.

Despite the resemblance, however, Cahill was neither a Unionist nor a Republican terrorist. Boorman shows him as a conventual gangster who happened to live in a time of political mayhem. He steals a Rubens from under the nose of the Gardai and then sells it, without prejudice, to loyalist paramilitaries. He stands up to the IRA when they try to take half the proceeds from a jewellery heist: ''There's nothing lower than robbing a robber.'' There's some Goodfellas violence in the film, too, but none of it is remotely political.

Over at Cannes, where Martin Scorsese was chair of the judges, they especially relished the implicit homage to the Italian-American master. When one of his accomplices tries to embrace him, Cahill thrusts him aside. ''We're not Eyetalians yet,'' he protests with a mirthful wink. But he is, and they are. John Boorman has discovered the Irish-American movie to carry on where Coppola and Scorsese left off.

One of the big drug dealers in Dublin these days is actually called The Sicilian. He moves in a city of organised crime which connects as tightly to Belfast as Chicago to Manhattan. You can see the location shots even now as the Sicilian passes the heroin to Frankie on the banks of a sunset Liffey.

As if in tune with California, former terrorists have been making the smooth transition from battledress to Armani. The Irish People's Liberation Organisation, an IRA splinter group, began trafficking heroin and ecstasy as early as 1989. Republic hardmen who once ran building scams, extortion rackets, and gambling dens, now include drugs in their Mafia portfolio. How the studio bosses' hearts must lift at the thought of all that gunfire and tight-knit camaraderie set among the emerald fields and sawdust pubs of old Ireland.

Authenticity will no longer be a problem for Hollywood. Where Martin Sheen might have found it embarrassing to look Mr Adams in the eye while starring in a movie as Bobby Sands, he'll have no such scruple playing an Irish gangster. If Jon Voight can play an Irish Garda in The General, why not Robert De Niro in his old role as The Sicilian?

While Boorman was shooting The General, one of the members of Martin Cahill's gang was connected to the murder of Veronica Guerin, the investigative journalist who exposed Dublin's drug-dealers. Boorman carried on filming. Then Cannes rewarded his myth-making biopic which became an instant hit at the box-office. As they say, never let the facts stand in the way of a good movie.