Politics & Power Quote by Gerry Adams

Urgency does most of the heavy lifting here: Adams frames republican goals not as ideals but as a timetable. The repeated "if" clauses stack conditions like checkpoints in a negotiation, implying both fragility and inevitability. Peace, in this telling, isn’t a soft alternative to struggle; it’s the route through which the struggle can win. That reframing matters in the late-20th-century Northern Irish context, where any move toward compromise risked being read as surrender by hardliners and as tactical deceit by opponents.

The operative phrase is "set the agenda". It’s a politician’s euphemism with a fighter’s edge. Adams is signaling internal discipline (to republicans who might splinter) and external leverage (to British and Irish governments, unionist parties, and even international mediators). The subtext is control: if you don’t define the terms, you’ll be defined by them. "No-one else is going to do that" doubles as warning and reassurance. It flatters supporters with agency while policing them: unity behind leadership isn’t optional, because the alternative is drift, delay, and a settlement written by others.

He also couples "peace process" with "Irish sovereignty and re-unification" in a single breath, refusing the idea that peace is separate from constitutional change. That linkage is strategic branding for a movement transitioning from armed conflict to electoral politics: peace becomes not an ending, but a mechanism. The line reads like an instruction manual for post-conflict power-building, wrapped in the cadence of necessity rather than ideology.