The Armalite and the ballot box

The Armalite and the ballot box describes a strategy in which electoral politics and armed struggle operated together rather than as simple alternatives. In the book, it takes shape through a history of protest, recruitment, imprisonment and political campaigning: Bobby Sands’s election bid demonstrated the force of electoral action, while Gerry Adams’s later campaign brought that lesson into Sinn Féin’s politics without initially abandoning abstention from Westminster.

Origins in protest and discrimination

On 1 January 1969, student protesters assembled at Donegall Square for a march from Belfast to Derry, roughly seventy miles away. They were protesting systemic discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, where Catholics were often excluded from good jobs and housing and lacked the political power to change their conditions. Although Catholics formed a majority on the island as a whole, they were a minority in Northern Ireland; no Catholic had held executive office at Stormont during its first half-century. Emigration for work helped keep the Catholic population nearly static despite a birth rate approximately twice that of Protestants.

The marchers initially believed peaceful protest could help undo entrenched injustice. Some also thought that a violent police response, as during the Selma march, might expose injustice and force change. The hoped-for political alignment was generational—young people against old institutions—rather than simply Catholic against Protestant or republican against loyalist. That expectation collided with the intimidation and attacks encountered on the route, including at Burntollet Bridge. For Dolours Price, the experience marked a break with the belief that marching alone could produce the change Ireland needed.

From protest to armed commitment

In 1971, Dolours Price asked to join the Irish Republican Army and took her oath in the front room of her family home. She understood this turn as a return to her family’s republican convictions. When Seán Mac Stíofáin initially proposed that she join Cumann na mBan, the female auxiliary, she refused a supporting role: she wanted to serve as a fighting soldier. A special meeting of the Army Council then decided that women could join as full members for the first time. Price later suggested that the mass imprisonment of men may also have helped prompt the change.

This episode shows that the armed side of the later dual strategy was not an abstract symbol. It meant joining an organization, accepting orders and seeking a role in its operations. The book also places that commitment against the state’s treatment of republican prisoners. After internment ended, convicted paramilitaries were treated as ordinary criminals, held in individual cells in Long Kesh’s H Blocks and required to wear prison uniforms. Republican prisoners answered with the blanket protest and then the dirty protest, demanding recognition as political prisoners. The disputes over status and the prisoners’ bodies became part of the political conflict surrounding armed action.

The ballot as leverage

Bobby Sands’s hunger strike opened a consequential electoral opportunity. He stopped eating on 1 March 1981. Four days later, the death of Frank Maguire created a vacancy in the House of Commons seat for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Republicans urged Maguire’s brother not to run, and Sands became the candidate from prison. The candidacy was intended to draw attention to the hunger strike; victory would make it harder for the British government to treat a dying prisoner only as an unkempt blanket protester.

Sands’s success in standing for election showed how the ballot could carry the prison protest beyond the prison walls. It also challenged a longstanding republican suspicion of parliamentary politics. Abstentionism held that participation could dilute revolutionary purpose; the new electoral tactic instead made a vote a means of publicizing the prisoners’ demands and contesting the government’s account of them. The change did not mean that armed struggle had simply been replaced by electoral politics.

Adams, Price and the two-track strategy

By 1980, Gerry Adams was arguing that military victories alone could not build a republic and that the struggle needed a political dimension. The success of Sands’s candidacy helped shape Adams’s decision to enter electoral politics. In 1983, he stood for West Belfast, while announcing that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster rather than take his seat. The position brought electoral participation together with a continuing refusal to recognize the authority of the parliament in which the seat was held.

Dolours Price supported Adams’s campaign. By then, she had abandoned violence as a means of pursuing a united Ireland for herself, while retaining her republican commitment. She canvassed, called on voters to support Sinn Féin and drove people to polling stations; Adams won. Her change of role makes the strategy’s unevenness visible: armed struggle and electoral politics could coexist within the movement, but individuals might move from one form of action to another. The expression therefore describes not a settled formula but an evolving political approach, in which the ballot became an additional instrument rather than proof that the armed campaign had ended.