Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes as trusted comrades and strategic partners

Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes as trusted comrades and strategic partners were bound by personal affection, mutual loyalty, and a division of labour within the republican movement. Adams was regarded as a political strategist who read the wider conflict; Hughes saw himself as a soldier and tactician, close to the armed operations and the men carrying them out. Their relationship was more than a contrast of roles: when Hughes was bleeding and hunted in Belfast, Adams came in person with a doctor, risking his own safety to help save his friend.

Formation and Complementary Roles

Adams and Hughes had met two summers earlier, during the riots of 1970, when Adams was directing rioters. Hughes could not remember Adams himself throwing stones or petrol bombs, but considered him effective at organizing others. In Hughes’s assessment, Adams was the key strategist for the Provisionals, while Hughes was a tactician: Hughes could plan an operation, but Adams could grasp the broader political context and the changing conditions of the conflict. The distinction was not simply between a thinker and a fighter. It described different forms of work within the same campaign, and each man’s account of the other helped define the partnership.

Their physical proximity to violence differed. Adams was known for avoiding direct violence himself; when cars carrying Armalites arrived in a neighbourhood, he would ride in the scout car, which carried no weapons. Hughes, by contrast, tended to be where the guns were. Dolours Price joked that she never saw Hughes without a gun and never saw Adams with one. Adams later described Hughes as having a tremendous following among the young men on the street, and said that Hughes’s inability to speak at length about politics was offset by an instinct for doing the right things. His praise also carried a hint of condescension: it recognized Hughes’s influence while distinguishing it from Adams’s own political articulation.

Loyalty and a Shared Political Family

Hughes regarded himself primarily as a soldier rather than a politician. He considered himself a socialist, but was not consumed by ideology; he was also a Catholic, though attending Mass took effort. Adams, by contrast, said the Rosary and read the Bible every night. Their differences in political and religious disposition did not cancel their closeness. Hughes’s reverence for Adams was such that, if Adams told him that tomorrow was Sunday when Hughes knew it was Monday, he would stop and think twice. The example conveys both the depth of Hughes’s trust and the authority Adams held for him.

That attachment was visible to Hughes’s family as well. His younger brother Terry remarked that Brendan’s real family was the IRA, and that his brother was Gerry Adams. The statement placed Adams inside Hughes’s sense of kinship, not merely among his political associates. The book presents this bond alongside the practical loyalty of comrades who depended on one another: Adams supplied strategic direction and political understanding, while Hughes’s standing on the streets and instinctive action gave that relationship a local, operational force.

The Rescue on Sultan Street

The bond was tested after Hughes escaped through the front window of a call house on Sultan Street. The broken glass had severed an artery in his wrist, and he was losing blood rapidly. The house was no longer safe, but taking him to hospital was considered impossible because soldiers were seeking to execute him and no sanctuary there could protect him. His colleagues moved him to another house, where he remained trapped while British Army patrols searched the neighbourhood.

After about half an hour, Adams arrived with a doctor. The doctor was a local heart surgeon who had hurried over without equipment. Someone fetched a needle, thread, and tweezers; the surgeon used the tweezers to find the recessed end of the severed vessel and then sewed the artery. He worked without anaesthetic, in close quarters, while Hughes could not cry out. A Saracen stopped directly outside and idled there as those inside waited, frozen, unsure whether armed men would break through the door. The danger made Adams’s presence more than an expression of sympathy: he had come himself, though he could have sent someone else.

That decision carried particular risk. According to the RUC Special Branch, Adams had commanded the Ballymurphy unit of the Provisionals and later became officer commanding of the Belfast Brigade, the senior IRA position in the city. He was more wanted by the authorities than Hughes. The account therefore sets the personal rescue against the danger facing both men: Adams entered a neighbourhood under surveillance to bring help to a comrade whom the army had targeted.

The City, Exile, and the Limits of Separation

Adams’s loyalty to Hughes was also tied to Hughes’s choice to stay in Belfast while on the run. Rather than retreat to the countryside or cross the border to Dundalk, where republicans could hide out in pubs, drink, and play cards, Hughes remained in the city with his soldiers in D Company. He kept up the pace of operations. Adams later said local people knew Hughes was there, and that his presence was the kind of incentive they wanted. In Adams’s view, Hughes’s continued presence mattered both to his men and to the community around them.

After the doctor had left and Hughes had been stitched up, Adams ordered him to get out of Belfast and lie low because another attempt on his life seemed likely. Hughes resisted leaving, but Adams insisted. Hughes went to Dundalk and booked a room in a bed-and-breakfast, yet managed only a week away before impatience brought him back. The brief separation shows the pull of the city and his men, as well as Adams’s capacity to make Hughes accept a course he did not want to take. The episode ends not with a rupture in their relationship but with its central pattern made unmistakable: Hughes’s commitment kept him near the fighting, while Adams’s judgment and personal loyalty intervened when that commitment put his life in immediate danger.