by Penn Rhodeen
Each member of the American group understood the importance of meeting with leaders in the unionist community, which is why they were so concerned with getting the UUP meeting back on track. But they wanted to do more than meet with establishment politicians. They wanted to hear the voices from the Shankill, the loyalist heart of Belfast.
They first met with Jackie Redpath, a longtime unionist community organizer, born and bred in the Shankill, who agreed to see them at Dukes Hotel. He later recalled that of the nearly twenty Irish American delegations that had come to Belfast two years earlier, only one sought out the perspective of the Shankill. Redpath recalls describing a community “under siege and in retreat”:
Belfast was becoming basically a nationalist/republican-dominated city, which it was in the early stages of then. The retreat was not only territorial but also political, because unionism had lost its political control of Northern Ireland under direct rule. It was economic, because of the decline of traditional industries like shipbuilding and engineering and linen. So much of the cultural and intellectual arena was dominated by people from a nationalist/republican background.
I tried to explain to the delegation that unionism felt itself in retreat and that wasn’t healthy. No community should find itself with their back against the wall, because then you tend to respond in an extreme sort of way and violently.
The Americans were deeply impressed with Redpath’s presentation, and he was impressed with them. As Redpath recalls, “That was my first serious interaction with political Irish America. Because the meeting was organized that morning, I’m not sure who they thought I was, and I’m not sure who I thought they were. But it was a good discussion. The fact that this delegation reached out to unionism and loyalism was very, very significant.” In time, of course, Redpath would learn a great deal more about the American visitors:
My job in meeting Bruce and his colleagues was to try and explain to them that there’s another community here that has a case, and this isn’t an issue of right or wrong—this is an issue of how you bring conflict to an end. All sides need to be taken account of in an equal and embracing fashion. Bruce did do that, even though he was perceived as leaning towards nationalism and republicanism. He had an ability to transcend that. I saw him as the pathfinder—in many ways he was able to open stuff up that Clinton and George Mitchell were able to follow into.
I can see that at key times he had a crucial role to play. Obviously that first visit and the seven-day ceasefire was of critical importance in a whole range of things. He was also persistent in coming back again and again and again, so there were other occasions that I met him, but that now gets wrapped up in a whole race of events that gathered pace. But this was the first—like somebody said, “the whole banquet is in the first mouthful . . .”
After the meeting, Redpath was asked to arrange another meeting, one far more audacious and potentially dangerous than any meeting with Sinn Féin: The Americans wanted to meet with loyalist paramilitaries. This would be like meeting directly with the IRA. Redpath reached out to Gerry Vinton, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, one of the largest and most violent Ulster paramilitary organizations. Word came back that Vinton and three other UVF men would be willing to meet with the Americans the next morning, but only on the condition that the meeting was kept secret. The UVF men—two of them convicted killers—would slip into Dukes Hotel, go to a prearranged private room, and await the Americans.
By any measure, the idea of representatives of Irish America meeting with an Ulster paramilitary group was extraordinary. By 1993, Sinn Féin was making headway as a political party, so it wasn’t completely unheard of for Americans visiting Northern Ireland to meet with them. Nor was it unheard of for American supporters of Noraid to meet with IRA men. But nobody met with the loyalist paramilitaries. These were groups of varying degrees of organization with names like Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Red Hand Commando. (The story behind the red hand, a central element of the Ulster flag, captures how far paramilitaries on both sides were willing to go: In the legend, a long-ago chieftain, racing another to be the first to touch the shore and claim Ireland for himself, sees that his rival is likely to beat him, so he cuts off his own hand and throws it ashore to win the race.) The loyalist paramilitaries were widely seen as being even lower than terrorists, because of the involvement of so many of them in criminal activities like robbery and drug trafficking. Terrorists claimed their violence was in service of high objectives; robbers and pushers had no such cover.
Although criminal activity wasn’t unknown among its members, the IRA was widely seen as an organized army, not just a ragtag bunch of killers. It had a command structure, it was disciplined, and it was capable of delivering orders and ensuring they were carried out, top to bottom. For all of the viciousness behind so many of their actions, the soldiers of the IRA enjoyed respect in many quarters. Their bravery and sacrifice, as well as their bold exploits and harsh circumstances and choices, were recounted in songs and ballads, and reflected, not always flatteringly, in the poems of Yeats, the plays of O’Casey and Behan, and in great movies like The Informant. The IRA was a political and cultural institution with an impressive pedigree: Its predecessor from the earlier part of the century had defeated the mighty British and won the independence of Ireland after centuries of domination. That tradition lent the IRA of the Troubles more of a glow than was deserved, perhaps, but when Sinn Féin spoke of them as “the Army,” it never sounded absurd.
Because the IRA had succeeded in being seen by many as an actual army, with the attendant trappings of authority and the nobility of their bravery and sacrifice, they stood, despite their terrible acts, on a different plane from the Ulster paramilitaries. Members of the republican and nationalist communities might have deplored their tactics, but the IRA was an abiding symbol of the struggle. To be sure, the Ulster paramilitaries saw themselves as having gone to war to protect their community from attacks by the IRA and from the unreliability of the British, but even in the eyes of much of their own community, they weren’t seen as a noble, disciplined fighting force.
For Morrison, the difference between the various paramilitary forces fighting in Northern Ireland boiled down to politics:
The IRA had a clearer political orientation and was far more effective in presenting its cause and its political justification. The loyalist paramilitaries were a more splintered band, and there was probably more overt lawlessness unrelated to political objectives. Most importantly, the loyalists failed to establish an effective working-class political base of their own.
After breakfast the next morning, Morrison and his companions approached the hotel meeting room where the UVF men waited. They were confident that the loyalist paramilitary men wouldn’t kill them when they entered the room, but beyond that, they had no idea what to expect. Morrison acknowledged years later that the prospect of meeting with such men was strange and a little frightening.
As the door opened, the first sight—“emblazoned in my memory,” Morrison says—was of an older gentlemen in a tweed jacket smoking a large, curved-stem pipe of the sort favored by Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus. He looked more like a kindly professor emeritus than a murderous paramilitary soldier. This was Gusty Spence, a UVF leader who had been convicted of murder years earlier. During the time he’d spent imprisoned for a crime he denied committing, Spence started to think that a political path might be preferable to the violent one the paramilitaries had so far taken.
Two other loyalists in the room had also served long sentences: Billy Hutchinson, who had been convicted of murder, and David Ervine, who had been caught in a car loaded with explosives, likely on its way to its intended target. Hutchinson and Ervine got to know Spence in prison and had been strongly influenced by his evolving views, which, ironically, had been influenced by those of an IRA member serving his own sentence for murder. The fourth member of the group, Gerry Vinton, had never gone to prison. He later pointed out, in a tone of quiet pride, that
he “was never convicted.” His ability to blend into the background, unnoticed in a group, was one of his strengths as a paramilitary man.
Despite Spence’s warm and welcoming demeanor, it was possible to see the hard man underneath. Ervine and Hutchinson—the first stocky with thinning dark hair and a bushy mustache, the other balding and lean as a greyhound, and both with piercing eyes—had the look of hard men right then as well. It wasn’t difficult to imagine them as younger men with guns they had used before and were willing to use again.
But then the men from Ulster began speaking, and with that, an entirely new chapter in the quest for peace in Northern Ireland—and a new role for the United States—began.
They spoke in a straightforward way, with deep feeling and candor, of their fears: fear of falling behind, fear of being abandoned by the British and the unionist political establishment, fear of what would happen to them as the Catholics continued to ascend, and fear of how bad it would be for them if word got out that they were meeting with the Americans.
They spoke of what they didn’t have: There was no urban working-class political party that offered a path other than the give-and-take of violence and death that had consumed the paramilitaries on both sides for so long. Unlike the IRA and Sinn Féin, the loyalists had no community in the United States bolstering them with money and political support. They didn’t even have the respect of the predominantly middle-class and rural unionist parties. On the contrary, they were denied and disdained by both the British and the established Northern Ireland party leadership as thugs and criminals. But when the respectable men of London and Ulster needed dirty work done, they would turn again and again to the paramilitaries, all while publically deploring the awful things these violent men had done. Even the radical Ian Paisley, who, in Morrison’s words, “engaged in fiery rhetoric that seemed to justify violence, but denounced the violence when it occurred,” left them feeling that they were merely being “used as cannon fodder.”
What struck Morrison as he listened to the UVF men was how their grievances sounded just like those of the republicans. He was reminded of the way it had been in the Jim Crow days of the American South, when the white establishment looked down on the poor whites—except when they needed dirty work done—but kept them stoked up with such a sense of superiority over the blacks that it was unlikely that the common economic interests between the two groups would threaten the established order. He lays it out this way:
Close your eyes and listen to the words, and the working-class people of each community have a grievance with the ruling class, which has essentially been playing divide-and-rule and causing the struggling people at the bottom to hate and kill each other as a way to manage control from the top.
Nothing was done in a way that would cause shared opportunity or shared progress. Nobody was told that new housing will be built when it’s shared—“You guys will have to agree on the allocations or it won’t happen at all.” There should be a benefit in cooperation and conciliation, instead of, “See those pricks over there? You ought to kill them because they’re getting what you aren’t getting.” I’m sure that they weren’t sitting at Whitehall planning this. But to the people in MI5, and Army and RUC types, this was their idea of how you control this uncontrollable heathen population.
More than anything, Morrison and his companions heard the pain and uncertainty of human beings faced with massive changes that were completely beyond their control. Yet they also heard, astonishingly, voices of once-violent men who were hopeful about the possibilities for peace. All of this profoundly changed the sense the Americans had of who they were dealing with. Recalls Morrison:
The upshot of that meeting was a clear realization that the situation of the working-class Protestant community was much more complicated than people liked to talk about, and that if we cared about a resolution, we needed to pay attention to their grievances and feelings. They had to be brought along. They didn’t have a natural constituency in the United States, the way the Catholics had the Irish American community—even though half the people in the United States who trace their heritage to Ireland are Protestant.
On the unionist side, the two major parties took all the political oxygen and the grassroots loyalists didn’t have a Sinn Féin– like political organization, which they still do not. It is really a tragedy for working-class loyalist people in Northern Ireland that their political analysis has always been done by rural, middle-, and upper-class leadership that actually disdains these people. They have taught these people that they had a birthright entitlement to an economic place, when, of course, in a modern competitive economy, there is no such thing left. So these people are unemployed and they don’t blame the right people.
The very thing they told us—“the Catholic communities are ascendant and we are being left behind”—is absolutely true, because the leadership of the unionist community left those people behind and blamed the republicans.
The meeting was revelatory not just for the Americans, but for the loyalists as well. For the first time, they experienced a group of Irish Americans as warm, sincere, and open-minded. Morrison seemed to understand the situation in all of its complexity and subtlety. They became open to receiving the Americans as trustworthy facilitators who’d come to Northern Ireland not to impose their predetermined solutions on the people who lived there, but to listen with engagement and respect. And they began to imagine that one day they could receive a warm welcome in the United States. According to Hutchinson, “The Americans gave us a fair hearing. They seemed to be on board for all the right reasons. Bruce gave assurances with his words and body language that he was serious and fair.”
That’s not to say that they weren’t apprehensive: Vinton, in particular, couldn’t disregard the possibility that the working-class men of the paramilitaries were being conned by these educated and accomplished Americans. But he and his companions responded to that fear in the way men of action do: They pressed ahead full force, making their case without holding back.
Hutchinson remembers the meeting as a chance to be heard and to see a new side of Irish America:
From my point of view, it was important to actually talk to those people at that time, because one of the things we were trying to find out from Irish Americans was in terms of the amount of money they were giving to the IRA to fund the war against British citizens. We wanted to make sure that in any future process, all that would be stopped.
I think overall, what they were saying made sense from my point of view. I suppose in many ways it changed my opinion, particularly of Irish America in terms of having a stereotype, being sort of cheerleaders for the IRA.
Morrison was the one who stood out in the whole meeting. It seemed to me that he was a strategist and had things well thought out. I warmed to some of the stuff he was saying—some I probably wasn’t comfortable with, but I could also see that if we were working on that basis, I could get more comfortable, I could put my feet up. He was an intelligent man—I think the things that stood out from him was, he was a negotiator, he was a strategist, and you could do a deal with somebody like him.
Hutchinson says the meeting led to “a totally new dynamic” between the loyalist paramilitaries and the United States:
Whenever we accepted all the things that came after—the American role itself and also George Mitchell as chair of talks and so forth—I think we wouldn’t have got there if we hadn’t have had that meeting. That was the meeting that cracked it for us.
Although the gathering was secret and the talk concerned conflict and fear, it felt to Morrison like a thoroughly engrossing session in the dark-paneled office of a distinguished professor at an ancient university. Years later, he’d look back on it as one of the most compelling and rewarding meetings he ever participated in at any time in his career.
The meeting with Sinn Féin, so highly anticipated by the media, was held in two parts. The first was the public part: a skillfully orchestrated and impressively media-savvy event at
which the American visitors and the very excited media could hear directly from the people of Sinn Féin’s community. It was held in a large hall on the fifth floor of Conway Mill, a converted linen mill off Falls Road that was partly surrounded by British army barracks. High windows on the side, iron pillars, and long diagonal bracing secured by huge bolts evoked the place’s linen-making days and provided an open space for the throng packing the room, 200 or more. There was barely enough space for each community group’s table and for the journalists covering the event. The thick walls of the mill kept it cool, even in the late summer.
Sinn Féin offered the Americans the chance to meet with a wide range of ordinary members of the republican community who had terrible but sometimes uplifting personal stories to tell. Each member of the American team could move from group to group and hear the stories. Traditional Irish music lifted spirits and boosted the energy in the room. The Irish News reported that it was “a lively reception.”
Although Morrison makes the point that, in light of the tragic stories being told, the event certainly wasn’t a party, still there was an aspect of celebration in the proceedings. This was a moment at which Sinn Féin and the republican community had plenty to celebrate: American friends of the new president had come, the ceasefire was holding, and Sinn Féin was getting unparalleled access to the world stage. Morrison was tremendously impressed with the skill and verve with which they seized the opportunity:
We’d had all these meetings with all these officials that were very somber, the usual office meeting. Then we go to Sinn Féin and the meeting is like a performance—all these groups, all kinds of Irish music and dancing, plenty of Irish speaking. There was a whole different approach, which made sense because our visit let them get this kind of coverage. Everybody else was just reacting to our presence, but they had a plan. Somebody might say we were being used by them, but it wasn’t really like that, because the fact that they had a plan sort of fits with my general take about them. Whatever else is wrong with them, whatever bad things they did, they had a vision, which at the end of the day was central to how it all came out. These guys were thinking about making history.