The long war

The long war was Gerry Adams’s strategic answer to a conflict that no longer seemed likely to end in a single, decisive military victory. As support for the Provisional IRA waned and the British appeared prepared to stay, Adams argued that republicans should stop promising imminent triumph, conserve their strength, and prepare for a struggle that might last years or decades. The strategy changed not only the expected duration of the conflict but also the meaning of victory: armed struggle could continue, but it was a means to political change, not the end in itself.

The crisis of the short-war expectation

By the mid-1970s, the Provisional IRA had been fighting for several years on the assumption that one final, furious push might drive the British out. That expectation had helped fuel the pace of early operations, recruitment, and morale. But the conflict was entering its sixth year, and violence had often fallen on the same people the IRA claimed to represent. Public support for the movement had tapered, while the British seemed to be settling in for an indefinite conflict. New H Blocks under construction at Long Kesh, designed to hold many more paramilitary detainees, gave the changing conditions a visible form: imprisonment and conflict were not about to disappear.

Adams’s alternative also answered a deeper republican inheritance. Earlier generations had often lived with repeated defeat, and the movement could take strength from a tradition in which oppression and the memory of failed struggles helped sustain its identity. The Provisional IRA’s annual declarations that the British would be expelled that year increasingly looked delusional after years of bloodshed. Adams was not persuaded by the romance of noble failure. He wanted his generation to force change within its own lifetime, but he rejected the claim that the next offensive would bring a quick conclusion.

Preparing for duration

The long-war argument asked volunteers to exchange the promise of imminent victory for endurance and preparation. That was a difficult appeal to make to men who had been beaten by loyalists, shot at by the army, tortured by police, driven from their families, and imprisoned at Long Kesh. A promise that fighting harder would soon end the conflict offered immediate hope; Adams’s assessment required them to accept that the struggle might continue for years, even decades. The strategy recast persistence as a deliberate choice rather than evidence that a decisive victory was just around the corner.

Adams developed and circulated his ideas through both prison networks and writing. While in Long Kesh, he spoke with Brendan Hughes and other prisoners at the wire, where discussions ranged across politics, history, and events outside the camp. In 1975, writing under the pseudonym Brownie for Republican News, Adams used articles to address the movement beyond the prison walls, including the prisoners’ conditions and his developing view of the conflict. He sometimes gave drafts to Hughes for comment. The columns and smuggled communications helped connect political argument inside Long Kesh with the organization outside it.

On the day of his release in 1977, Adams walked around the yard with Hughes discussing strategy. He argued that Sinn Féin should operate more in tandem with the armed organization and proposed replacing the IRA’s traditional military-style hierarchy with a cellular structure more typical of paramilitary groups in Latin America. In Adams’s analysis, smaller cells would limit what an interrogated or turned volunteer could reveal: a captured member would know the contacts in that cell, not the entire command. This was a proposal for greater security as well as a structure suited to a prolonged struggle. Adams left Long Kesh with his belongings in a brown paper bag, while Hughes remained there; the two men’s conversation linked the immediate prison world to the larger task of remaking the movement.

Political struggle as part of the war

The long war did not mean that military action alone would eventually produce the desired outcome. Adams increasingly argued that the conflict would end not simply through military triumph but through some form of political settlement. He described armed struggle to young IRA men as a means to an end. When he presented political work as part of the strategy, some volunteers resisted the distinction, identifying themselves as an army rather than politicians. The exchange exposed a central tension: the movement had to retain the commitment and identity of its armed members while preparing to pursue aims through politics as well as force.

This political turn did not amount to an immediate renunciation of violence. After leaving prison, Adams stayed in close contact with Hughes through smuggled communications and reorganized the Provisional IRA, shifting its centre of gravity away from Dublin by creating a Northern Command. In 1980, he stated that a republic could not be built on IRA military victories and that military means alone could not secure victory. Yet the strategy still included armed struggle; its innovation was to place that struggle alongside a political dimension rather than treat military success as sufficient in itself.

Significance and development

The long war altered the movement’s timetable and its account of what success would require. It replaced recurring forecasts of near-term expulsion of the British with a demand for organization, security, and endurance, while opening a path toward closer coordination between Sinn Féin and the armed organization. Adams’s later embrace of electoral politics belonged to this wider development: in 1983 he sought a parliamentary seat for West Belfast, building on a strategy in which political action could accompany, rather than simply follow the abandonment of, armed struggle.

The strategy therefore held two ideas in tension. It insisted that the struggle must continue long enough to produce change within the current generation, yet warned that change would not come quickly and might require a political settlement rather than a battlefield victory. Its significance lies in that combination: the long war was neither a promise of imminent triumph nor a call to give up the armed campaign, but a framework for sustaining the conflict while changing how the republican movement organized and pursued its aims.