“A ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other”

“A ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other” is the expression Danny Morrison used to capture a strategy in which Sinn Féin would contest elections while the Provisional IRA continued its armed campaign. It condensed a political reversal into a single image: the ballot paper did not replace the weapon, but appeared beside it. The phrase’s lasting significance lies in that deliberate tension, which made electoral politics both an alternative route to power and a companion to violence.

From abstentionism to electoral opportunity

For generations, many republicans had adhered to abstentionism, avoiding parliamentary politics because participation risked accommodation with British rule and the dilution of revolutionary purpose. That suspicion had helped shape the 1969 split between the Official IRA and the Provisionals: some republicans feared that the Officials had become too political. The new strategy therefore challenged not just an electoral tactic but an inherited account of what fidelity to the republican cause required.

The opening came during the hunger strike at Long Kesh. After Frank Maguire died, creating a by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, republicans proposed that Bobby Sands run for the seat from prison. His candidacy could bring attention and support to the strikers; if elected, he would also become a member of Parliament while imprisoned. Sands won on 10 April 1981, after forty-one days without food, though his demands remained unmet. His victory demonstrated that people who rejected IRA violence might nevertheless vote for a republican hunger striker, revealing an electoral constituency the movement could seek to reach.

The phrase and its political work

Gerry Adams saw the Sands election as an opportunity to give the struggle a more political dimension. Working with Danny Morrison, he developed a strategy in which Sinn Féin would seek office while the IRA continued its war. At a Sinn Féin gathering, Morrison framed the approach as a question about taking power with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other. The formulation did more than describe simultaneous activities: it presented them as parts of one political project.

The phrase is built around a paradox rather than a reconciliation. The ballot paper evokes participation in an electoral system; the Armalite rifle stands for armed struggle. Their placement in the same hands refuses the expectation that one must be set aside before the other can be used. That ambiguity was politically useful: it could speak to voters attracted by republican representation without announcing that the armed campaign had ended. It also left unresolved the question of whether electoral success would transform the struggle or simply extend it by other means.

A strategy tested in later politics

In 1983, Adams sought a parliamentary seat for West Belfast. He announced that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster, preserving a connection to republican abstentionism even as he campaigned for votes. Dolours Price, who had abandoned violence as a means of pursuing a united Ireland while retaining her republican commitments, canvassed for him and ferried voters to polling stations. Adams won. Her participation illustrates how the electoral turn could draw in people whose earlier lives had been shaped by armed action, without requiring them to abandon republican identity.

The strategy’s later meaning remained contested. After the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Féin became increasingly powerful, while the IRA was ostensibly sidelined and agreed to decommission its weapons. Yet Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he had ever been in the IRA reinforced uncertainty about whether former combatants could speak openly about the past. Critics such as Anthony McIntyre were discredited as dissident republicans or opponents of the peace process; the party’s discipline helped preserve what one scholar called a monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle.

From tactical paradox to historical legacy

The phrase’s paired objects also illuminate the book’s larger concern with how a war continues in memory after battlefield violence has diminished. The account opens with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s observation that wars are fought again in memory. In that second contest, the ballot-and-Armalite formulation can be read both as a record of a political strategy and as a compact story the movement could tell about its transition from armed campaign to electoral influence. Its neatness risks making the two instruments seem coherent partners, even as their coexistence signals a conflict the phrase cannot settle.

The post-agreement landscape underscores that unresolved legacy. Belfast’s busy centre and Troubles tours could make the conflict seem distant, but more than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland still attended segregated primary schools, and disputes over flags continued to provoke unrest. A report on paramilitary organizations argued that their continuing hierarchies could help restrain members and support political progress, a counterintuitive claim that complicated the assumption that peace required every armed structure to disappear immediately. Against this setting, the expression remains more than a slogan for electoral pragmatism: it names the unsettled passage between violence and politics, and the struggle over who gets to define what that passage meant.