Armed struggle

Armed struggle in the book is not a single, fixed tactic but a political choice whose meaning shifts over time: from a turn away from peaceful protest, to an organized campaign demanding obedience and sacrifice, and eventually to a legacy contested within electoral politics and public memory. Its significance lies in this movement between force and politics, and in the costs of treating either as a complete account of the conflict.

From protest to armed commitment

The account begins with the structural conditions that made protest urgent. On 1 January 1969, students gathered at Belfast’s Donegall Square to march to Derry against discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. Catholics faced exclusion from good jobs and housing and had little access to executive power at Stormont; emigration was so extensive that the Catholic population remained nearly static despite a much higher birth rate. The marchers nevertheless believed peaceful resistance might expose injustice and help redraw the conflict’s divisions, turning it into a generational contest rather than simply a struggle between religious or political communities.

That confidence was shaken by the Burntollet Bridge ambush. The book identifies the experience as the turning point for Dolours Price: she concluded that marching would not convert those responsible for the violence or produce the change Ireland needed. In 1971, she approached an IRA commander and joined the organization, pledging to advance its objectives and obey orders. She later understood this decision as a return to the republican convictions of her family, rather than a wholly new allegiance. The sequence gives armed struggle a specific political and personal context: it followed an attempted strategy of peaceful resistance and the experience of that strategy being met with violence.

Membership, discipline, and gender

Price wanted to participate as a combatant, not be confined to the supporting work associated with the female auxiliary, Cumann na mBan. She insisted on being treated as equal to men and sought full membership in the IRA. A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council then determined that women could join as full members for the first time. The book suggests that Price’s ambition and republican family background helped bring about the change, while also recording her speculation that mass arrests of men may have made the organization more willing to admit women.

Formal membership did not exempt Price from ordinary discipline or menial work. Soon after her induction, she was given rusty, mismatched bullets and steel wool and ordered to clean them. She considered the assignment degrading and questioned whether the ammunition would even function, but she had promised to obey orders and treated the task as both an initiation and a test. The episode makes the organization’s demands tangible: commitment meant accepting its hierarchy even when an order seemed pointless or designed to humble the person receiving it. The IRA’s secrecy reinforced that discipline. Because membership itself could bring arrest, young recruits often kept it from their parents, and unexplained absences could go unchallenged in West Belfast.

From armed campaign to electoral politics

The book places armed struggle alongside, rather than outside, the republican movement’s long-running suspicion of parliamentary politics. Abstentionism held that participation in political institutions could dilute revolutionary purpose; that suspicion contributed to the 1969 split between the Official IRA and the Provisionals. Yet imprisonment and the hunger strike created a striking political opening. After Frank Maguire’s death required a by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, republicans proposed that Bobby Sands run for the seat from prison. His candidacy could bring attention to the hunger strike, and victory would make the government’s treatment of a prisoner who was also a Member of Parliament harder to dismiss. The proposal marked a significant departure from the movement’s traditional reluctance to enter electoral politics.

Price’s later activity shows how that departure altered the practical meaning of commitment. She had abandoned violence as a means of pursuing a united Ireland, though not republicanism itself. She canvassed for Sinn Féin and supported Gerry Adams’s campaign for West Belfast in 1983. Adams promised that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster and not take his seat, preserving a connection to abstentionism even as he pursued an electoral mandate. Price helped ferry voters to polling stations, and Adams won. The book thereby presents the ballot box not as an uncomplicated replacement for armed struggle but as a strategy developed within a movement still shaped by its armed past; the success of Sands’s candidacy helped make that political turn possible.

Discipline, memory, and an unresolved legacy

After the Good Friday Agreement, the conflict’s conclusion is described as a stalemate rather than a decisive victory for either side. Structural discrimination had largely receded, and the RUC had been replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, but no formal process had been established to determine how the Troubles should be understood or commemorated. Gerry Adams’s continued refusal to acknowledge that he had been in the IRA deepened the uncertainty around disclosure. In this setting, the book’s account of armed struggle extends beyond the period of active violence: who may speak about it, and whose account becomes authoritative, remain political questions.

The Belfast Project interviews were gathered amid the risk attached to speaking outside republican circles. Interviewers were outsiders, and participants could be branded informers for telling journalists or authorities what was known within the community. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin’s leadership sought to discredit critics as dissident republicans or opponents of the peace process; one scholar characterized the result as a party monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle. The conflict’s second life in memory is therefore not separate from its first: organizational silence and political messaging shape what can be said about the armed campaign and who is believed.

The book also presents a tension in the post-ceasefire survival of paramilitary hierarchies. To Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price, Marian Price, and Anthony McIntyre, Sinn Féin’s intolerance of opposition appeared self-interested and cruel. Yet a Villiers report argued that the continued cohesion and authority of paramilitary groups had helped move society from extreme violence toward political progress by enabling leaders to influence and restrain members. That counterintuitive claim does not erase the violence or settle the argument over the movement’s conduct. It shows why armed struggle remains difficult to describe as either a completed past or a simple precursor to peace: its structures could preserve discipline and contain renewed violence even as the struggle’s meaning, memory, and political legacy remained fiercely contested.