Politics & Power Quote by Gerry Adams

Adams frames militancy not as a preference but as a reluctant civic duty, and that’s the move: he relocates the IRA’s violence from the realm of choice into the realm of necessity. The key phrase is “in the past” - a temporal firewall that nods to the Good Friday era without fully disowning what came before. He isn’t offering repentance; he’s offering a tidy moral accounting that can survive a transition from insurgent politics to parliamentary legitimacy.

The line “defended the right” is lawyerly on purpose. It narrows the claim from endorsing every act to asserting a principle: that armed struggle was a legitimate option under specific conditions. That distinction matters in a political landscape where association with violence is both a mobilizing myth and a reputational hazard. He also casts the alternatives as forms of humiliation or complicity: “bend the knee” (submission), “turn a blind eye” (moral cowardice). It’s not just that armed struggle was available; it’s that refusing it would have been ethically degrading.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To supporters, it reassures: the movement’s history wasn’t criminality, it was resistance with a telos - “a national republic.” To skeptics, it signals moderation through grammar: past tense, conditional reasoning, and the rhetoric of constrained options. In a conflict defined by contested legitimacy, Adams’ intent is to keep the cause intact while making the methods sound historically bounded, even inevitable.