Gerry Adams's Long War strategy

Gerry Adams's Long War strategy replaced the promise of imminent victory with a more demanding political timetable: republican change had to come within the current generation, but the struggle might take years or decades, and military action alone could not deliver its ultimate purpose. It asked fighters to endure a prolonged conflict while beginning to imagine its conclusion in political terms.

From protest to armed struggle

The strategy emerged against a background of failed efforts to secure change through peaceful protest. On 1 January 1969, student demonstrators set out from Belfast for Derry to protest discrimination against Catholics, who faced exclusion from good jobs and housing and had little access to political power in Northern Ireland. Some marchers believed that peaceful protest might expose injustice and redraw the conflict's divisions as a generational struggle between young and old. The attack at Burntollet Bridge helped overturn that hope for Dolours Price. In 1971 she joined the IRA, regarding the decision as a return to her family's republican convictions rather than a continuation of faith in marching as a route to change. These events do not by themselves define Adams's strategy, but they show the political conditions in which armed struggle gained force.

Replacing the promise of quick victory

Adams argued that his generation must not simply pass the struggle on to another. Yet he also challenged the expectation, repeated in annual declarations, that the British would be driven out within the coming year. Instead, republicans should marshal their resources for a long war. The change in timeframe was not a promise that endurance would make victory certain; it was a demand to prepare for a conflict that might continue for years, even decades.

That argument was difficult for fighters who had already been beaten by loyalists, shot at by the army, tortured by police, separated from their families while on the run, or imprisoned at Long Kesh. A promise that one more offensive would end the conflict offered immediate hope. Adams's alternative required them to accept that their present ordeal might persist without a near-term finish. The strategy therefore changed not only expectations of duration but the meaning of perseverance: staying in the struggle mattered even when victory could not be scheduled.

Armed action as a means, not an end

Adams also began to change how the movement described victory. A military triumph alone, he argued, was unlikely to end the conflict; some form of political settlement would have to do so. The armed struggle was a means to an end, not the end itself. In 1980, after leaving prison, he remained in close contact with Brendan Hughes through smuggled communications and reorganised the Provos by establishing a Northern Command. He argued publicly that a republic could not be built on the IRA's military victories alone and that political action had to run alongside the armed campaign.

This was not a call to abandon violence. The book sets Adams's political argument beside the 1979 bombing that killed Lord Louis Mountbatten and three others, a reminder that the conflict continued to produce lethal action even as republican strategy acquired a political dimension. The distinction was between violence as the whole purpose of the struggle and violence as one instrument within a broader campaign—not between armed action and an immediate renunciation of it.

From long struggle to electoral politics

The later electoral turn showed how the political dimension could develop without making the earlier armed struggle disappear from the movement's history. Bobby Sands's decision to stand for Parliament from prison, during his 1981 hunger strike, was an improbable departure from a tradition of republican abstentionism. His candidacy made political participation a means of drawing attention to the prisoners' cause and demonstrated the potential power of electoral support.

By 1983, Adams himself was seeking election to Westminster for West Belfast, while declaring that he would not take his seat if elected. Dolours Price, who had once joined the IRA after losing faith in peaceful protest, canvassed for him and drove voters to polling stations; he won. Her trajectory and Adams's political turn illuminate the widening space between armed commitment and electoral activity. The Long War strategy's lasting significance in this account is its effort to hold together a demand for change within one generation, preparation for protracted conflict, and recognition that military victories alone could not settle the political struggle.