Parliament of the United Kingdom

The Parliament of the United Kingdom is presented as an arena that republican politics first approached with deep suspicion, then used to amplify a prison protest and advance an electoral strategy. Bobby Sands’s candidacy from prison and Gerry Adams’s election exposed the tension between winning political representation and refusing to participate in the institution itself; the later peace agreement shifted that debate toward participation in a newly created Northern Ireland assembly.

Political Context and Republican Abstention

The book places parliamentary politics against a background of exclusion in Northern Ireland. Catholics faced discrimination in employment and housing and lacked the political power to change their conditions; Stormont, the devolved political system, had not seen a Catholic hold executive office in half a century. Against that experience, the Parliament of the United Kingdom represented a political route that many republicans also regarded with distrust.

That distrust had a history within the movement. Republicans had long practised abstentionism, avoiding elected institutions on the grounds that participation could dilute revolutionary commitment. The division between the Official IRA and the Provisionals in 1969 was linked in part to a suspicion that the Officials had become too political and that politics would lead to accommodation. Parliamentary participation therefore carried more than practical significance: it tested the movement’s account of what political compromise might mean.

Sands’s Candidacy from Prison

The death of Frank Maguire, a nationalist Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, created a by-election while Bobby Sands was on hunger strike at Long Kesh. Republicans urged Maguire’s brother not to run, making it possible for Sands to stand from prison. His candidacy promised publicity for the hunger strike and raised a political question the campaign could not easily avoid: whether the British government would allow an elected representative to die in prison.

The strategy marked a departure from the movement’s established abstentionism. Sands won the election, but died before he could take his seat. His victory nevertheless demonstrated how an electoral campaign could redirect attention toward the hunger strikers and alter the political stakes surrounding their protest. Margaret Thatcher’s government had refused to recognise the strikers’ political status; the election placed that refusal in sharper public view without resolving it.

Adams’s Election and Non-participation

In 1983, Gerry Adams stood for the Parliament of the United Kingdom as the representative for West Belfast. He drew on the precedent created by Sands’s electoral success, while preserving an explicit distance from parliamentary participation: Adams announced that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster rather than attend. He won, and Dolours Price supported the campaign, canvassing for him and driving voters to polling stations on election day.

Adams’s election thus made representation itself useful even as he rejected the institutional role it ordinarily conferred. The British government lifted the ban that had prevented him from travelling to the mainland so he could take his seat, but he had no intention of participating. His position formed part of a broader political transition: he had become convinced that Irish unity could not be achieved through armed force alone, while the movement still had to negotiate its relationship to electoral politics.

From Parliamentary Abstention to Assembly Participation

The peace agreement established a different institutional settlement for Northern Ireland. It provided for a devolved assembly and close links with the Republic of Ireland, while leaving Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom unless a majority there chose unity. Under the principle of consent, the governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland would be obliged to honour such a choice. Sinn Féin agreed to set aside abstentionism and allow its representatives to serve in the new assembly.

That agreement did not amount simply to a retrospective acceptance of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Rather, the book traces a change in political method: Sands’s candidacy had made electoral action a powerful instrument during a hunger strike; Adams’s election had combined success at the polls with a refusal to take his seat; the peace settlement then made participation in devolved government part of the negotiated political process. The contrast shows how an institution once treated as a threat to republican commitment could become one point in a wider, still contested path from armed struggle toward political negotiation.