ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how and why the Provisional movement remained broadly unified throughout its profound tactical and strategic reorientation in the 1980s and 1990s. It begins by scrutinising how the Provisionals developed their 'long war' strategy during the prison protests of the late 1970s and undertook electoral experiments in the 1980s. The chapter proceeds to analyse Sinn Fein's "pan-nationalist" initiative before assessing its subsequent strategic reorientation through negotiations, ceasefires, and constitutional politics in the 1990s. IRA prisoners, meanwhile, increasingly positioned Sinn Fein's electoralism as a constructive mechanism facilitating the peace talks through which republicans would win their long war. In the early 1980s, however, in an attempt to achieve propaganda coups and combat their political isolation, the Provisionals began experimenting with electoralism. If all-party talks held the key to a republican breakthrough, the argument ran, then nominally repudiating guerrilla warfare was a price worth paying provided all other parties did likewise.
