The Attempted assassination of Gerry Adams in 1984 brought the danger surrounding the West Belfast MP into public view: gunmen opened fire on his car in central Belfast, wounding him and three others, but none of the four died.

The attack

Adams’s journey to court came after his entry into electoral politics. In 1983, he had won election as the MP for West Belfast, while maintaining the traditional republican position that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster rather than take his seat. The campaign marked a change from his earlier role in the armed movement, but did not remove the risks associated with his public profile.

In 1983, the RUC had arrested Adams during an attempt to stop a Sinn Féin motorcade displaying tricolour flags. By the spring of 1984, he was on trial in Belfast, charged with disorderly behaviour and obstructing the police. The proceedings made his location unusually predictable: despite years spent on the run and efforts to keep his movements uncertain, it was widely known that he would be at court in the city centre.

Adams had become so concerned for his safety that he applied for a licence to carry a firearm for self-defence. The RUC rejected the application. He also spoke of believing that there was a 90 per cent chance he might be assassinated, a stark measure of how he understood the danger even as he moved through public life.

During a lunch break in the trial, Adams left the Magistrates Court and got into a car with associates for the short drive back to West Belfast. On Howard Street, traffic slowed and a brown vehicle pulled alongside. Two gunmen fired a dozen shots. Adams was hit in the neck, shoulder and arm; three other people in the car were also wounded. The attackers did not kill anyone.

Aftermath and political response

The gunmen were quickly apprehended and identified as members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters. From his bed at Royal Victoria Hospital, Adams alleged that the authorities had known in advance about the attack and hoped it would succeed. The account presents the allegation as his claim, not as an established finding. Ian Paisley responded publicly by invoking Adams’s past association with deaths, while fellow members of the British Parliament offered no expressions of sympathy or condemnation. Their silence left the shooting framed not only as an attempt on Adams’s life but also as evidence of his continuing political isolation.

The electoral turn

The path into electoral politics had been opened in part by Bobby Sands’s 1981 candidacy. After nationalist MP Frank Maguire died, republicans urged Sands, then on hunger strike in prison, to contest the resulting by-election. His success showed that a prison protest could also command support through the ballot box, although Sands died before he could take his seat.

For generations, many republicans had distrusted parliamentary politics, fearing that participation would dilute revolutionary aims. That suspicion had contributed to the 1969 split between the Official IRA and the Provisionals, amid the belief that the Officials had become too political and were moving toward accommodation. Gerry Adams’s own electoral strategy therefore combined a new use of the ballot with a promise to boycott Westminster. The attempted assassination unfolded within that unresolved shift: electoral participation had changed the movement’s public course, but it had not removed the danger surrounding its leaders.

Significance

The attack crystallized the contradiction at the heart of Adams’s public position: electoral politics brought him into the institutions and visibility of public life, while his association with the armed movement continued to shape how others regarded him. The shooting did not settle that contradiction. Instead, the parliamentary silence and Adams’s allegation of prior official knowledge left the episode suspended between political violence and contested trust in the authorities.