“the fish and the sea” guerrilla-warfare metaphor

The “the fish and the sea” guerrilla-warfare metaphor makes the relationship between an armed movement and its civilian environment the central problem of conflict. In the book, the image explains how Brendan Hughes moved through West Belfast with the help of local people, but it also acquires a darker counterinsurgency meaning when Frank Kitson turns the same logic against the community that shelters the guerrilla. The metaphor thus links practical survival to political allegiance—and shows how attempts to control that allegiance can deepen the conflict they are meant to suppress.

The image and its setting

Hughes was partial to a line attributed to Mao: “the guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea.” The comparison gives the community more than a passive background role. It is the environment that makes the guerrilla’s movement possible, offering concealment, routes, and assistance that an armed group cannot supply for itself. The image also carries a warning: a fish separated from the sea cannot survive. Military strength alone cannot compensate for the loss of the social world on which an insurgent depends.

The book places the metaphor in a society where peaceful protest had seemed to some young people a possible route to change, but where violence and political exclusion altered their expectations. The Belfast-to-Derry march began as a protest against discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. By 1971, after the attack at Burntollet Bridge had changed Dolours Price’s view of peaceful resistance, she joined the Irish Republican Army. The metaphor does not make that transition inevitable; it helps explain why the relationship between political movements and the people around them became so consequential.

Hughes and the local community

For Hughes, the “sea” was not an abstraction. He knew the alleys, fences, vacant houses, and washing lines of West Belfast, and local residents sometimes let him pass through their homes or hide from pursuers. Some were intimidated and felt they had little choice; others helped out of solidarity. The community’s support was therefore real but not uniform, and the metaphor’s apparent simplicity conceals a range of pressures and loyalties.

Hughes cultivated local relationships as a practical necessity. When one of his operations damaged property, he paid the affected family compensation. The book also recounts his care for “Squire” Maguire, an invalid on Cyprus Street: during a period of fires, raids, and street violence, Hughes carried him to the pub for a pint and later carried him home. In another episode, an elderly woman stepped between a British soldier’s rifle and Hughes, telling the soldier that he would not shoot anyone on her street that evening. Hughes escaped. These acts show the sea not merely as cover but as a neighbourhood of particular people, obligations, and acts of protection.

That support also had a clandestine infrastructure. Ordinary family homes could serve as call houses—safe houses, waiting rooms, or dead drops—and families might make room for a fugitive arriving after midnight, even moving sleeping children to provide him a place to rest. Yet the army faced a “wall of silence” when it sought information about the Irish Republican Army in West Belfast. Informers, known as “touts,” carried a deep stigma. The silence protected the organisation, but the evidence makes clear that it could reflect intimidation as well as solidarity; the metaphor does not turn a pressured population into a single willing body.

Kitson’s counter-image

Frank Kitson understood the same dependence and recast it as a military vulnerability. He, too, liked the fish-and-sea comparison, but advised that a fish could be attacked directly by rod or net—and that, if those methods failed, it might be necessary to “do something to the water.” Where Hughes’s use of the image stresses that the guerrilla must belong among the people, Kitson’s version treats the surrounding society as something to alter in order to expose or disable the armed movement. The water becomes a target.

This approach arose amid an intelligence problem. Hughes’s Provisional IRA D Company, part of the Belfast Brigade, was operating in West Belfast, an area British soldiers called “the reservation.” Its members were difficult to distinguish from civilians, while the army’s earlier practice of using gas in neighbourhoods had caused damage and hostility. Kitson regarded intelligence as essential to destroying the movement, but the social stigma against informing and the community’s silence frustrated that aim.

The mass internment operation of August 1971 illustrates the danger in treating the population as a means of reaching the guerrilla. Three thousand British troops swept through nationalist areas; nearly 350 suspects were arrested, and not one was a loyalist, despite loyalist paramilitary violence. Because the arrests relied on intelligence from a largely Protestant police force, the disparity reinforced many Catholics’ impression that the army was another instrument of sectarian oppression. The operation did not simply search the water for fish: its unequal reach risked making the water more hostile.

Meaning across a changing conflict

The metaphor is therefore both a description of insurgent dependence and a contest over how civilians are understood. Hughes’s local knowledge and relationships helped him escape immediate danger, while the army’s search for intelligence confronted a community in which cooperation could be stigmatized, coerced, or refused. Neither side’s use of the image erases the distinction between voluntary assistance and pressure; instead, the episodes show why that distinction matters to any account of how armed groups survive.

The book also traces political change beyond the street and the safe house. In 1971, Dolours Price’s insistence on being a “fighting soldier” helped prompt the Provisionals’ Army Council to admit women as full members, against a background in which men were being arrested in large numbers. Later, Bobby Sands’s decision to run for Parliament while on hunger strike offered a new way to draw public attention to the prisoners’ cause. By 1983, Price was canvassing for Gerry Adams and driving voters to polling stations as he won the West Belfast seat, while pledging to boycott Westminster. These developments do not belong to the fish-and-sea image alone, but they sharpen its significance: a movement’s relationship with the public could be organized through armed action, community ties, or electoral politics, and those methods could change over time. The metaphor endures because it makes that dependence visible, while Kitson’s counter-image exposes the peril of trying to govern a conflict by treating the surrounding society as terrain to be manipulated.