Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams: prison comrades with diverging political and military roles

Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams formed a close partnership in the Provisional IRA, first working together in Belfast and later sharing confinement at Long Kesh. Their relationship joined operational command to political strategy: Hughes remained responsible for military and prison leadership, while Adams increasingly argued that armed struggle needed a political counterpart and a longer horizon. The division did not amount to a simple break between them; even after Adams’s release, they maintained contact and exchanged ideas across the prison walls.

Belfast Command and Capture

In July 1973, Adams was the officer commanding for Belfast, and Hughes served as his operations officer. They met daily, alongside Tom Cahill, who handled the finances. That summer, when Adams went to a call house on the Falls Road to meet Hughes and Cahill, both men were inside when British troops raided the building. The apparent businessman Adams had waved to from a parked car was in fact surveilling him; troops had gathered around the house and waited for both leaders to enter before beginning the operation. As soldiers flooded inside, Adams lit his pipe. The two men were taken to a police station on Springfield Road and beaten and tortured for hours. Their capture exposed how vulnerable their shared command work could be to surveillance, but it also placed them together in the next phase of their relationship: imprisonment.

Cage 11 at Long Kesh

When Hughes returned to Long Kesh after being caught in disguise as a toy salesman, Adams was already serving a sentence there. Adams had twice tried to escape and had been caught; he had settled into the regularity of prison life, which he found less stressful than life on the run. He and Hughes shared Cage 11. Their closeness, established before this period, grew in the cramped, draughty accommodation, where cold winds passed through the huts and prisoners wore socks on their hands to keep warm.

Conversation became a central part of their shared life. Adams encouraged political and historical discussion among the prisoners, who met at the wire separating the cages. The prison also brought their temperaments and private commitments into contrast. Hughes, who had come to regard himself as not merely unreligious but anti-religious, read speeches by Fidel Castro; Adams quietly recited the rosary. Their differences did not prevent companionship, but they suggest distinct sources of conviction beneath their common commitment to republican struggle.

From Immediate Victory to the Long War

By the mid-1970s, Adams was questioning the expectation that one final offensive would drive the British out. Years of violence had reduced public support, while the British appeared prepared for an indefinite conflict. The new H Blocks being built at Long Kesh made the prospect of continued detention visible within the prisoners’ daily surroundings. Adams argued that his generation should bring about change within its own lifetime, but he also rejected promises of imminent victory. The movement, he maintained, needed to prepare for a long war rather than announce each January that the struggle would soon be over.

This shift placed Adams’s political thinking alongside Hughes’s responsibilities as a leader among imprisoned volunteers. Adams acknowledged that the armed struggle was a means rather than an end, and that a settlement would probably be political as well as military. That argument was difficult for men who had endured violence, flight, arrest and imprisonment, and who could more readily be sustained by the promise of a near-term victory. The partnership therefore carried a strategic tension: Hughes’s role was grounded in the immediate demands of command and prisoner life, while Adams was trying to persuade the movement to accept a longer timetable and a broader definition of success.

Communication Across the Prison Walls

Adams turned his developing ideas into articles for Republican News, writing under the pseudonym Brownie because open IRA membership was illegal. He smuggled the columns out of Long Kesh through the same communications network that carried tiny handwritten messages on cigarette paper. Before sending drafts for publication, he often showed them to Hughes. Hughes was less drawn to abstract analysis and sometimes needed to read a column several times to grasp its argument, but he remained an important reader and interlocutor. Their exchange made political theory part of an ongoing personal and organizational relationship rather than a message Adams developed entirely apart from the men expected to follow it.

In 1977, on the day Adams was released, he paced the yard with Hughes and discussed strategy. Adams believed Sinn Féin should work more closely in tandem with the armed organization and that the Provisional IRA should move away from its traditional military-style hierarchy toward a cellular structure. He considered cells more secure because a captured member who was interrogated and turned would know only the contacts in that cell, not the full command. The proposed reorganization was intended to make a prolonged struggle more sustainable. Before leaving, Adams hugged Hughes; Hughes remained inside Long Kesh, responsible for maintaining order among the prisoners, while Adams left to pursue the larger task of reshaping the organization.

Diverging Responsibilities, Continuing Partnership

Their separation in 1977 changed the form of their collaboration rather than ending it. Adams kept in close contact with Hughes through smuggled communications. Outside prison, he reorganized the Provisional IRA, shifting its centre of gravity away from Dublin by establishing a Northern Command, and continued to advocate a political dimension to the conflict. In 1980, he argued that military victories alone could not build a republic. This was not a call to abandon violence; political work was to proceed alongside the armed struggle.

Hughes, meanwhile, remained the commanding officer inside Long Kesh during the prisoners’ escalating protests against criminalisation. When the blanket protest developed into the dirty protest, he advised prisoners to smear their excrement on the walls. The resulting squalor, the guards’ efforts to hose prisoners down and disinfect their cells, and the prisoners’ renewed defiance made Hughes’s role starkly immediate and physical. The contrast with Adams’s organizational and political work is central to their relationship: one led within the prison’s daily confrontation, while the other worked beyond its walls to change the movement’s structure and strategy. Yet Adams remained in contact with him throughout, and their shared history at Long Kesh continued to connect those distinct responsibilities.