[3] Whilst at university at the end of the 1960s Conway became caught up in the then cultural zeitgeist of proletarian revolution off the back of the Paris riots, and was influenced by the activities the South American revolutionary Che Guevara.
[5][6] On being released from imprisonment in 1974, Conway was appointed by the newly formed "Provisional Irish Republican Army" (which he had joined after the faction had split from the "Official IRA") to organize from scratch a strategic level intelligence capability based in Dublin to assist in its operations.
[8] He rejoined the PIRA during the 1981 Irish hunger strike, and was active in the organisation in the 1980s before leaving it on 15 December 1993, with conflicting sentiments upon the acceptance by its leadership of the terms of the "Downing Street Declaration" (i.e. that the governmental status of Northern Ireland could only be altered by the democratic decision of its population).
In part he regarded the ending of the campaign by the PIRA leadership as a "betrayal" of its political objective of the eradication of the state of Northern Ireland and the acquisition of its territory by an Irish Republican state, but at the same time he recognized that the PIRA was faced with imminent military defeat by the United Kingdom's security forces in the early 1990s, and that calling a formal cessation of its campaign and a disciplined disbandment of itself whilst it still retained the authority of command for the decision, was an act of realpolitik on its leadership's part.
He has also stated that although not renouncing his actions in Irish Republican paramilitarism when viewed from their contemporary perspective, he wouldn't have engaged in it if he had known at the time that it would end in political failure, and that a "United Ireland" is unachievable as long as the Ulster Scots people oppose it.