by Thomas Leahy
A primary reason for these talks was that Hume and Fianna Fáil realised that British counter-insurgency policies had failed to significantly damage the IRA. British policies had also not succeeded in isolating Sinn Féin from the nationalist electorate in Northern Ireland.11 Hume admitted that he had to involve the Provisionals in a political settlement because: ‘five British governments and twenty thousand troops had failed to stop the violence’.12 Martin Mansergh says that by the late 1980s the Irish government had realised: ‘[p]aramilitary violence on both sides represented a form of political veto …. capable of prolonging the stalemate and frustrating political initiatives’.13 Albert Reynolds, the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach who gave further momentum to pan-nationalist talks in the 1990s, agreed that ‘[n]o one believed the IRA could be stopped … The British army could not defeat them … more people would die unless an alternative solution could be found.’14
The SDLP had realised that Sinn Féin had become a ‘permanent fixture’ in northern nationalist politics by the late 1980s.15 Despite a slight decline in support during the 1980s, Sinn Féin repeatedly obtained at least 10 per cent of the vote in Northern Ireland, representing a sizeable minority of the northern nationalist vote. They held the majority of seats in Belfast, Fermanagh, Cookstown and Omagh councils at various points during the conflict.16 Adams remained the West Belfast MP until 1992, and was re-elected in 1997. In 1998, Sean Farren of the SDLP said: ‘the SDLP is aware … that Sinn Fein … does represent a section of the people in Northern Ireland … political progress would be much more likely if that section of the community was able to join with other sections of our society’.17 In other words, the exclusion of a considerable minority of nationalists would not bring about peace.
Sinn Féin polled poorly in southern Irish elections. Neither had the party beaten the SDLP in northern elections. Yet the ‘threat’ remained that Sinn Féin could erode their rivals’ electoral bases in the north and south because they had a similar ‘ethos’. Mansergh observes that the Irish government remained aware of the continued ‘risk after particular incidents and at times of high tension that the situation might get completely out of hand’.18 The burning of the British Embassy in February 1972 in Dublin following Bloody Sunday, and the support for IRA hunger strikes in the Republic of Ireland supports his argument. For O’Donnell: ‘[t]he decision by Fianna Fáil to engage in dialogue with the republican movement was … the realization that Sinn Féin’s ability to maintain, while not necessarily extending, its support in Northern Ireland necessitated a process inclusive of Sinn Féin’.19 Persistent IRA activity and consistent electoral performances by Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland encouraged the SDLP and Irish government to talk to Sinn Féin. As a veteran Troubles commentator explains:
[i]t was always the thinking that it was going to be the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists settling matters … [But] the Provisionals would keep on bombing. Continuing instability was guaranteed because you would have people who were outside of the settlement, attacking it all of the time.
For the SDLP and Irish government, talking to Sinn Féin was ‘the only show in town’ by the late 1980s if they wanted peace and political progress.20
Hume had also experienced the deadlock that Sinn Féin’s presence could cause in local councils during the mid-1980s. Following Sinn Féin’s gains in local elections in June 1985, Hume told the British government that republican councillors’ presence in local councils would be a significant obstacle because unionists refused to work with republicans. Political deadlock followed.21 In Craigavon and Cookstown, for instance, unionists proposed a motion that meant council business would be conducted via special subcommittees which excluded Sinn Féin. The High Court intervened and ruled that the unionist motion was illegal. Nonetheless, unionist refusal to work with republicans on councils continued.22 By talking to republicans, Hume demonstrated his belief that the political stagnation would only end through the inclusion of republicans in political talks in order to remove the armed campaign that unionists hated.
Another important reason for the constitutional nationalists talking to the Provisionals was the failure of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 to create multiparty talks that included unionists.23 Unionists rejected the agreement as they were outraged at the involvement of Dublin in Northern Irish affairs without their consent, especially since the Irish government had not amended articles two and three of the Irish constitution, which claimed their sovereignty over Northern Ireland. Many unionists took to the streets in protest, and the unionist parties refused to talk with the British for a number of years. Despite the British government resisting calls to terminate the Anglo-Irish Agreement, unionists’ reaction did not offer constitutional nationalists much hope that they were ready to compromise.24 The constitutional nationalists and Catholic Church representatives involved in pan-nationalist talks felt that such a political compromise might be more likely to be forthcoming if an IRA ceasefire were on offer. Father Reid, for instance, informed Haughey in May 1987 that reconciliation and political agreement ‘cannot properly begin … while … [unionists] feel that they are under actual physical attack from the nationalist community’. Reid believed that an IRA ceasefire was fundamental to political progress.25
The SDLP and Fianna Fáil did share the objective of Irish unity with Sinn Féin.26 By the 1990s, both wanted power-sharing within Northern Ireland and cross-border bodies in the short term, but Irish unification in the long term with the consent of the both parts of Ireland, separately but concurrently. They did not support the use of political violence to achieve unity at any time during the conflict. Fianna Fáil was created in 1926 by former members of the anti-treaty IRA. The party disagreed with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 for various reasons, including its denial of all-Ireland self-determination.27 Catherine O’Donnell observes that Fianna Fáil always had a ‘natural affinity’ towards northern nationalists because they agreed that: ‘the self-determination of Northern Ireland can only be exercised within the confines of the republican definition of the nation, the island as a whole’. O’Donnell believes that Fianna Fáil sought to ensure that there was endorsement of any northern agreement by both parts of the island so that: ‘the right of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland to self-determination … no longer operates independently of the island as a whole’.28
It would be unfair, however, to argue that Hume and Fianna Fáil primarily engaged with republicans because they wanted to confront the British with a united Ireland agenda. According to Danny Morrison, one of the Sinn Féin representatives who met with the SDLP in 1988, ‘The SDLP … were pretty hostile to the talks.’29 Sinn Féin letters responding to discussion papers with the SDLP in 1988 demonstrate the distance between the two sides. In August 1988, Sinn Féin argued that the SDLP’s claim that the British government was neutral flew ‘in the face of all the facts’. Republicans were also ‘most disturbed by the SDLP pronouncement … that the unionists have “a natural veto”. We would ask you to retract that statement as it seriously undermines nationalist presentation … of the six-county state as “artificial”.’30 It was evident from August 1988 that the SDLP were not talking to Sinn Féin in order to bring about a united Ireland in the short term. Hume argues that he listened to Sinn Féin because: ‘if the killing … could be ended by direct dialogue, then it was my duty to attempt to do just that’.31 It seems that a humanitarian instinct to end the conflict motivated Hume. A former British civil servant believes that Hume was willing to sacrifice his party for peace.32
Fianna Fáil felt that IRA activity prevented self-determination and peace by antagonising unionism.33 For this reason, and the fact that they saw the IRA as a threat to southern Ireland as well, their relationship with militant republicanism was based on repression until the late 1980s.34 Following the Irish Civil War, the Irish government was primarily concerned with the preservation of its own state. Fianna Fáil and other parties in the Dáil agreed to repress the republican movement because the latter did not r
ecognise the Irish government until 1986.35 The Provisional IRA said that the Irish government was illegitimate because it betrayed the promise to uphold the Republic across the entirety of Ireland, as stated in the 1916 Proclamation and during the first Dáil.36 Consequently, the Irish state felt that the IRA were a direct threat to its existence, despite the IRA issuing General Order Eight. This order declared: ‘[v]olunteers are strictly forbidden to take any military action against 26 County forces’.37 Occasional incidents in which the IRA engaged southern state forces only served to intensify this fear. For example, republicans shot a Garda officer in County Wexford in October 1980 after a robbery. Later, on 16 December 1983, republicans killed another Garda officer and a member of the Irish Army during a shootout in County Leitrim.38
The importing of various weapons from Libya into southern Ireland heightened Dublin’s concerns about republicans.39 In the long term, the Irish government feared that the IRA could turn their guns against the Irish state. Such fears had some justification. The IRA’s Green Book stated that the Irish government was not legitimate.40 In addition, this author was given a printed copy of various speeches by republicans that a former Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs from the 1980s had collated. These speeches by Sinn Féin leaders focus on their future plans for the southern Irish state. The fact that this Irish politician collected these speeches, as did the Department of Foreign Affairs, shows that they were suspicious about republican intentions towards the Irish state, or that they wanted to keep these speeches for propaganda purposes to deter Irish people from voting for Sinn Féin. One example, a Time magazine article in November 1979 notes Gerry Adams saying that republicans wanted: ‘a decentralised socialist state … the government … in the Republic must come down’.41 In 1982, Sinn Féin MP Owen Carron told an audience in London that socialists in the UK and Ireland needed to ‘intervene to destabilise the South’.42 Of course, most of these speeches were political propaganda aimed at gathering support in the Irish Republic. Nevertheless, the fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Irish government kept a record of them suggests that these threats were taken seriously. Adams certainly recognised that the Irish government claimed to be under threat from the IRA. In the Politics of Irish Freedom in 1986, Adams attempted to relieve any fears on the part of southern Irish people by saying that the IRA posed them no harm.43 If talking to and getting the IRA to accept a political compromise could end their campaign, Fianna Fáil realised that the threat to the Irish state from militant republicanism would significantly decrease.
A Change in British Strategy, 1989–1998
Niall Ó Dochartaigh argues that ‘[i]n 1989 and 1990 the ship of state changed course’. Whilst British state policy shifted ‘only a single degree’, this was significant because it enabled a peace process inclusive of Irish republicanism to begin.44 Whilst various factors influenced this change in policy, republican strategy had also impacted on British policymakers by 1989, in three ways. First, costs relating to the conflict remained high for the British state. As many security-force personnel were needed to try to contain the IRA as there had been at the height of the Troubles in 1972. The IRA’s activity had declined since 1972, but republicans had accepted that their activities would decrease once they adopted the cell structure in Belfast and Derry City. With the support of rural IRA units, the organisation maintained a persistent and disruptive low level of armed activity into the 1990s. Security costs also remained high because of the commercial bombing campaign by the IRA, which increased in intensity during the 1990s. Since the IRA was heavily armed with Libyan weapons in the 1990s, there was little prospect that these costs were going to decrease in the short term. Even prior to the Libyan weapons arriving, one civil servant in a report to the Prime Minister in December 1981 reached the conclusion: ‘there is a limit to the extent to which … security forces can prevent a relatively small number of terrorists from committing some acts of murder and violence’. ‘[T]he Northern Ireland public’, the civil servant added, ‘is … unlikely to experience from now on an appreciably lower level of terrorist activity unless the terrorists decide to give up violence of their own volition’.45 The evidence in Chapters 8 and 9 suggests that this verdict remains accurate for the 1990s.
The second way in which republicans influenced British strategy was via Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate. From the early 1980s, Sinn Féin regularly secured approximately 10 per cent of the vote in Northern Ireland, and it was difficult for the British government to ignore such a sizeable minority of the nationalist electorate.46 Examples from recently released UK archival papers highlight the pessimism that Sinn Féin’s electoral support produced in British officials. In November 1982, following Sinn Féin’s acquisition of approximately 10 per cent of the vote, one British civil servant described how the result ‘demonstrates that [Sinn Féin] enjoys numerically significant support in Northern Ireland, whether we like it or not’.47 Another British official commented that the ‘significant’ results for Sinn Féin included gaining ‘32.3% of the identifiable nationalist first preference vote’. ‘Sinn Fein can, therefore, claim’, the official argued, ‘to represent a significant proportion of the nationalist side’, which was difficult to overlook if the British government wanted to show that politics was the way forward for Northern Ireland.48 The British state’s policy of limiting access to ministers for Sinn Féin proved ineffective in enticing significant support away from republicanism.
One example perfectly encapsulates the difficulties for British officials and other political parties in Northern Ireland when they tried to bypass elected Sinn Féin representatives. A Belfast city council motion passed in September 1984 barred Gerry Adams from attending the opening of the new Whiterock leisure centre. In retaliation, Sinn Féin held their own opening there on 12 September, two days before the official ceremony. A civil servant describes in some disbelief the unfolding of subsequent events:
[at the] ‘people’s opening’ as it was called … With the tricolour flying from the Leisure Centre roof, Mr Adams was photographed introducing local children to the facilities they could now enjoy and a plaque was erected outside the Centre recording, in Gaelic, Mr Adams [sic] involvement in the opening ceremony. By comparison, the official ceremony was a complete flop. Those attending were barracked by local people protesting at the decision to ostracise Mr Adams … This was a considerable propaganda coup for Sinn Fein. Instead of central and local government, it was Mr Adams who emerged with all the credit even though his organisation had done nothing to contribute to the provision of these facilities.
The author of the report warned: ‘this problem is going to arise with increasing frequency’ as a result of the expected council election successes for Sinn Féin (which duly emerged in May 1985).49 Sinn Féin’s electoral presence made it more difficult for the SDLP, unionists and the British state to make local politics operate in Northern Ireland.
The third factor was the decision by constitutional nationalists to search for a political settlement that included the Provisionals. The British government was not in a position to be able to create a political agreement without republican consent in the 1990s.50 The pan-nationalist talks were not part of an official alliance between the Sinn Féin, the SDLP and Fianna Fáil. However, whilst not an electoral pact, these talks did convince Fianna Fáil and the SDLP that the republican movement should at least be given the opportunity to negotiate a political settlement with other parties following an IRA ceasefire. Efforts by the British government to leave Sinn Féin on the sidelines were no longer supported by Fianna Fáil or Hume. John Major, for example, argues that the Brooke–Mayhew talks with the constitutional parties in 1991 and 1992 failed to produce a political settlement because Hume: ‘[wanted] to wait until the Provisionals were ready to move forward’.51 Later, Jonathan Powell commented that Tony Blair’s threat to leave republicans behind unless they resumed a ceasefire in 1997 was somewhat idle:
we had no way of going ahead without [republicans] as … the
… SDLP was not prepared to do so, [which] would mean we had no Catholic component to a cross-community consensus … SDLP reluctance to move without Sinn Féin was a problem that was to bedevil us throughout the process.
Powell added that creating a constitutional party settlement without republicans was not possible in 1997, because ‘the SDLP and Irish government would only countenance that option if Sinn Féin had been given a chance and walked away from it’.52
These three principal factors encouraged a small but decisive shift in British policy in 1989.53 Peter Brooke, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, publicly stated in November 1989 that the British forces could not militarily defeat the IRA.54 A year later, despite the IRA’s killing of Ian Gow, the Conservative MP, Brooke made another speech promising ‘a role in the peaceful political life’ in Northern Ireland for republicans following a cessation. He added that the ‘British Government has no selfish or strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland.’ Brooke explained that the British government wanted a cross-community agreement.55 His speeches marked ‘a defining moment in Britain’s approach to Ireland’. The British government sought to encourage republicans to renounce violence and join a political settlement, rather than seeking to leave them outside of political agreements.56 Further evidence that Brooke was serious about engaging with republicans was that he authorised MI6’s Michael Oatley to meet Martin McGuinness in October 1990. Contact between both sides continued to varying degrees until late 1993.57